Don’t spiders only eat things that they kill? I have a hard time believing that “chunks of flesh bitten off by the lizards” were carried into the spider webs. The spiders probably just caught some of the termites and wrapped them in webbing, though the mistake on the part of the first responders is probably excusable. I’m sure they didn’t stop to analyze all of that too closely.
I would imagine the first responders saw the black widow and jumped to conclusions as to the cause of death. Unless the man was allergic to the spider venom, how could it have killed him, let alone killed him so fast he didn’t have time to call emergency services? How in the world could they have seen one tiny spider bite on a half-eaten, rotting human corpse? And why would the lizards be eating him when they had free access to an all-you-can-eat termite buffet? Most animals choose their natural food source before looking for alternatives.
Also, do termites eat living flesh? I thought they only ate wood.
Well, there are a couple of possibilities.
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The venom could have triggered an allergic reaction, sending him into anaphylactic shock and ultimately death.
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Putrefaction would make flesh more … malleable.
Granted, there are some potential holes in the story (which nevertheless take away nothing from its skull-banging creepiness) and it has a distinct urban legend flavour (though Snopes does not seem to have anything on this) but still.
[sub]>>twitch<<[/sub]
ETA: Termites eat cellulose – plant and wood fibers. Although humans can consume it as fibrous roughage, we can’t digest it, so unless the termites had run out of some nice tasty timbers to snack on, I doubt they would have been feeding on much more than maybe bits of clothing or something. Plus, termites don’t much care for sunlight. They’d much rather be scurrying around the floorboards or rafters.
If it were up to me:
- Turn off all heat sources in the place.
- Place a nice, toasty heating pad near the door. Every snake and lizard that comes over gets scooped up and lovingly placed in a safe, comfy new home. Every spider that comes near the door while were rescuing the snakes and lizards gets pounded with a sledgehammer.
- Once all the snakes and lizards are out, burn the fucking place to the ground.
I considered all that but I was too busy suppressing an extreme case of the willies to post anything else.
Seriously I don’t get why some people are so freaked out over spiders. Why are they worse than other insects? Hell, they eat other insects, which is a good reason to keep them around. (The non-poisonous ones of course.) I mean no offence and I know we’ve all got our phobias, but I don’t see why a spider is more threatening than a mosquito, fly, or wasp.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, anything with over 4 legs freaks me out*. Spiders freak me out more because they even have more than legs than insects. I thank god that I have never encountered a centipede or millipede in person.
*Mutant lambs and other mammals with extra limbs excluded - even though they are freaky - I feel confident that they are not going to scurry up my leg or drop on me from the ceiling.
A phobia is an abnormal fear of something. Naturally it doesn’t make sense to someone who isn’t abnormally afraid of spiders.
Spiders freak me out but I don’t have a phobia. Bridges don’t bother me but my mother has a panic attack if driving over one. Bridges aren’t inherently dangerous and she’s never suffered a bridge-related trauma but the fear is there.
ETA: I have a shark phobia. In spite of living in the midwest, by Lake Erie, where there are no sharks.
For me, it’s three-fold:
- The eyes. Those black, soulless dots. Gyahhh, close-ups of them just skeeve me right the fuck out.
- The way they eat. The whole “inject digestive juices into prey and then drink their innards” thing. That ain’t right…I’m pretty sure that’s how Satan enjoys a meal too.
- And, of course, the concrete fact that they hate humanity and want us all dead.
Cases like this one are not as rare as you might think. IME, the deceased usually died of a heart attack/stroke/aneurysm/whatever, and the media has fun speculating on cause of death.
I vote for the zookeeper who died from giving an elephant an enema. Although there was talk that he had been knocked out and therefore not aware of being smothered under 300 lbx of backlog.
Most of what happened to the spider wrangler happened after he was dead. Creepy for the clean up crew. Unhappy for the relatives. Not of much interest to the dearly departed, who might have been the sort of person to get a kick out of the idea.
Pure. Unadulterated. Hogwash.
C’mon, people, let’s fight some ignorance here.
Like ::Spider pig, spider pig, does whatever a…::
Any German-speakers care to do some searching on the local press?
Here’s another UK paper (similar in quality to The Sun, but a little better). Just seen it’s dated 2004, so probably not much luck in pursuing this.
Pure Unadulterated Bullshit.
So the *Sun *pretty much copy-and-pastes a three year old story, does not reveal that, and it’s a legitimate newspaper? They write this line as if it is news?
Really? That guy is still in the morgue in Germany?
It’s almost impossible for a seven-legged lamb to attack me once it’s on my grill. I say almost impossible, because with seven legs it just might jump up one last time, stabbing me with its lamb fangs.
That’s why I put that sucker on a spit.
I found copies of news stories from February 2004 in German-language discussion fora. The name given was Mark V. (I assume “Mark Voegel” is a bit of an extrapolation on The Sun’s part - German authorities do not release full names of accident victims etc, and someone named “Mark Voegel” would be likely to apply for (and be approved) a last name change because “Voegel”/“Vögel” is not only the plural of “bird” but also the imperative form of of “to swive”…) - “Vogel” would be a much more usual surname.
The few articles mentioned a large number of insects/spiders who had to be recovered by animal rescue, but said spider bite was only a possibility, the corpse was not eaten, no bites were detected, and that the corpse was too far gone to do much toxicological tests.
Hold on a tick: where do you get the date on that story? If it’s from the masthead of the site, that’s nothing to do with the story: it’s autogenerated. The actual story linked by the OP seems to be from the archive.
Can’t believe I’m vaguely defending The Sun here…