I had a spider in my ear before too. It was not fun. Happened back in 1997.
I opened my big garage door enough to duck under it, as i had done hundreds of times before. Something brushed my ear as I ducked under, just figured it was a bit of debris from the bottom of the door. Got what I went in there for, clsed it and went out.
Then, I kept feeling a little tickle in my ear. Dug with my finger to no avail.
It wasn’t a “crackly” sound like the boy described, at least not to me. To me, it felt a lot like it feels when you get water in your ear canal.
After numerous vigorous attempts at getting it (which I assumed was water) out by shaking my head to the side, I finally feel something … weird. I happened to be in my bathroom at the time, holding on the sink for stability. I looked into the sink expecting to see a few drops of water or something … imagine my suprise when I saw a good sized spider scurrying around that DEFINITELY had not been there before.
Needless to say, that was the last time I ducked under the garage door like that.
Not fun. When I was 12, I spent a week at summer camp. There were a lot of ticks that year, most people in my cabin found at least one tick on them that week. I thought I’d been lucky, until I noticed a bit of discomfort in my ear. Along with a rustling sound.
I told my mom my ear hurt, and she thought it was swimmer’s ear. She tried flushing out my ears with alcohol, peroxide, whatever. Nothing helped, although the alcohol stung really bad. I kept telling her I heard something moving around in my ear, like there was a bug in it. She didn’t believe me, but with the pain getting worse and nothing helping, she took me to the doctor thinking this had turned into an ear infection.
The doctor freaked when he looked in my ear, and invited all the office staff to have a look. Yeah, there was a tick in my ear. It had been living there for at least a week, possibly more, my memory’s fuzzy since it’s been 13 years since it happened.
It gave me a lot more than just a case of the heebie-jeebies, but a full-on phobia- now I freak out if anything touches my ear, and if a person gives me a wet willy they will probably get punched in the face.
So, not quite a spider feeding off my ear war, but an equally gross story of a bug living in the ear.
When I was young, my dad moved a couple of walls upstairs to make a walk-in cupboard into a computer room. This room had the hatch leading upto the attic in it. As it was a makeshift room it had no windows so it got really hot in the summer.
My friend was playing a game on the Amstrad CPC464 and I was watching. We opened the hatch leading upto the attic to let the air flow around and cool the room off a little. A spider slowly dropped down from the attic, unknown to me, and landed on the top of my ear. I reached up to scratch, feeling the tickle, and it tried to run into my ear. I paniced, it dropped to the floor and I tried to stamp on it.
I got yelled at by my mother for making so much noise after the baby had gone to bed. To this day she doesn’t know how unfair that was.
To quote Scott Adams, “Reporters face the dilemma of painstakingly researching every story and just writing down whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same.”
There’s a minor point in Doug’s Staff Report that I wish to take exception to. So I’m just going to tack it on to this existing thread.
This isn’t quite true. Spiders will also consume their own silk, plus whatever has gotten stuck to it. Mostly what gets stuck to it is pollen.
This silk consumption is a form of recycling. It takes a fair amount of energy for a spider to make the silk, so they save future energy expenditures by reusing the silk material.
I also have a spider in ear testimonial - about 6 months ago, while watching TV one evening, my husband complained of a tickle in his ear, like some wax had come loose. He was due for a cleaning anyhow, so I sat him down in the bathroom and put a few drops of peroxide in. Instantly, to my surprise, out crawled a teeny tiny grey spider, species unknown. I was too creeped out to say anything for a couple of seconds, and stood there shaking my hands in disgust, but finally got out that there was a spider IN his ear. I don’t remember what exactly happened after that, being too grossed out, but the spider was disposed of and it has not happened again.
I am writing a book on spiders, and interviewed one of the world’s leading taxonomists for it. He told his own spider-in-ear story, which resulted in the doctor inn the emergency room showing him the mangled remains of the spider he had removed. The arachnologist shocked the doctor by naming the acutal species! There are very few people in the world who could do that, given how hard spiders are to classify accurately, especially little ones.
Thank you for the direction to Cecil’s debunk on the two-spiders-in-ear story. I hadn’t picked that up. Everything rings true.
Apart from their own silk, another thing they will consume are their own legs. I guess it depends on your definition of ‘kill’. If they drop a leg due to threat (automize them) then they will eat the leg so as not lose the nutrients. The babies will also consume bits of the mother while she is still alive, and not kill her. I showed a photo of one of the wolf spiders in my garden, whose young had almost all left her back, to an arachnologist. She wasn’t looking her gorgeous velvety self, so I commented on what a mess they had left. Seems they’d been having a bit of a nibble of her.
