Talk:Brazilian wandering spider
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Article Grading: Spiders To do:
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[edit] taxonomy
Many authorities call this spider by the scientific name Phoneutria fera. Taxonomists, help.
See the following URL: http://www.minaxtarantulas.net/artiklar/phoneutria/phoneutria_e.html
There are several species, all of which might be called "Brazilian wandering spiders." It's a little like the "black widow" designation. Several species are similar in appearance and toxicity of venom. P0M 20:18, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There are many spiders whose species can be distinguished reliably only by investigating the "lock and key" characteristics of their genitalia. The Phoneutria genus may have species that are more easily distinguished if you know what to look for, but my guess is that people recognize all members of the genera as "wandering spiders". As far as the article goes, it's a "many-to-one" mapping problem. Probably we should include information given in the above URL on the several species. Images available by Googling seem to be mainly of fera and nigriventer, but there are very few images available and the lack of other images may be just due to nobody having felt like taking a picture and putting it up on the web. One of the sad things about the WWW is that people publish good stuff and then the website disappears. I have a really beautiful image that I copied for my own use. Now I wish I had more than the URL because the whole thing is gone and I can't ask the author to put his/her picture up on Wikipedia. P0M 17:10, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
Zoology writers, please help out your readers by telling us where the animals live. Or are we really just supposed to go, hey, it has "Brazilian" in its name, so that's all there is to that. The spiders never wanders across any borders, I suppose.... Why not state the animals range?
Stating the range might be somewhat problematic - in the case of P. fera and P. nigriventer, these are two species that are known from human habitations, particularly in Brazil, and so their distribution with respect to human habitations is fairly well known. How well their distributions are known in rainforest areas depends very much upon which rainforest areas have been visited, bio-assayed and recorded as known locations for the species in question. It takes time and effort to survey in fine ecological detail several million square miles of rainforest! However, if the type localities of the five species listed in the main article are widely distributed on the South American continent, then you can take it as a good indication that all five species are likely to be widely distributed and overlap to a certain extent, given that these spiders are very mobile, capable of moving at a quite alarming speed, and also possess, for spiders that are nominally adapted as ground-dwelling pursuit predators of insects such as cockroaches, surprisingly good climbing ability. I'll have a chat with some of my invertebrate zoology associates and see if they can point me at some decent distribution maps sometime! Calilasseia 03:26, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
- The information I've found has usually been written nation by nation, and the range descriptions have been mostly in terms of political subdivisions. (The same limitation applies to the Australian venomous funnel-web spiders.) Sometimes it is rather alarming how provincial attitudes are, how much more politics takes precedence over geography, etc. Then there are sometimes pecularities that are hard to explain, e.g., the absence of widow spiders from a substantial area in western Africa despite the fact that there are plenty of them to the north, south, and east. Similar gaps in the spider maps of various species in the U.S. may occur, but in those cases it appears that the state without a kind of spider that is reported in all surrounding states simply hasn't conducted a survey to discover what spiders are common within its borders. P0M 11:00, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
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- Ah, this brings me to the aphorism that in some cases, the recording data for a species tells you more about the prevalence of recorders than the species being recorded - something I am familiar with as a volunteer entomological recorder! It's entirely possible that the same phenomenon affects the Brazilian Wandering Spiders, but in this case one has to take into account the fact that parts of its range may not be easily accessible. Here in the UK, there are few places that cannot be accessed by even an amateur recorder with access to a car, and some areas are subject to intensive biological recording because there is a long history of volunteer recording in the UK - finding someone willing to go out and engage in the same activity in a remote region of Amazonian rainforest hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of civilisation is a much more difficult proposition! Even when teams of professional scientists head into such regions, the prior planning needed (and concomitant expense) is considerable, so even if one ignores for a moment any provincialist tendencies on the part of the persons conducting the recording, the logistical difficulties count for a great deal. Plus, since most of the existing geographical boundaries in that region are lines drawn on a map, a certain amount of politics is going to interfere in the process whether one likes it or not, particularly in regions where there are disputes over where those lines are to be drawn. Of course, this can be neatly circumvented by recourse to GPS coordinates, but even then you need someone to have the foresight to take the GPS equipment with them ... and equipment that can operate reliably in environments that aren't usually friendly (in terms of humidity etc) toward sensitive electronics. Calilasseia 15:02, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Antivenom origin inconsistencies.
Quoting this article: The antidote for their poison was developed by Carlos Chagas, in Brazil.
Quoting Spiders_having_medically_significant_venom: "since the development of antivenom to the venoms of both were developed (the funnel web spider in the mid-1980's and the wandering spider in 1996)"
Quoting Carlos Chagas: Carlos Justiniano Ribeiro Chagas (born July 9, 1879, Oliveira, Minas Gerais, Brazil; died November 8, 1934, Rio de Janeiro)
I doubt he developed the antivenom 62 years after his death.
- There are probably two people by that name. Unfortunately, somebody failed to provide a citation. Maybe googling for it would get the correct information. P0M 21:30, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
- Was not the man Carlos Chagas and yes the Carlos Chagas Foundation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.79.31.244 (talk) 20:04, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] In Fiction
"The Fear from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater used the venom from the aforementioned spider to cover his crossbow bolts with it to fire at the player. (Additionally, it is not confirmed if it's the most potent poison in the game itself.)"
In the game the crossbow bolt deals about 18% of you health per minute. The second highest is about 15% per minute. This is not 100% accurate, however i used a computer program i made to view a video i made of many different life bars going down from poison and found a semi-accurate response that it is the most deadly.
[edit] "Natural Viagra" external link
I assume this link -- LiveScience.com - Natural Viagra: Spider Bite Causes Erection -- might be the original version of the FoxNews one. I'm hesitant to change it, though, without knowing the protocols. -- Pheeboris 13:17, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
- I've fixed it. P0M 03:33, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
