Around 3 a.m. on Dec. 27, as 51-year-old Fiona Donagh settled into bed in her home in New South Wales, Australia, a funnel-web spider sunk its fangs into her chest. The pain of the bite yanked her out of a post-holiday slumber. Despite the stinging sensation, and the red rash spreading across her torso, Donagh was able to trap the spider in a glass jar for identification. Its capture proved crucial, allowing doctors to administer the proper antivenom.
Funnel-web spider bites like these are rare, though they can be severe. In such cases, antivenom will make the difference between life and death. But the Australian Reptile Park, a New South Wales zoo that provides all of the country’s funnel-web spider venom, is currently at risk of running dry. The zoo milks the spider for their venom to produce the antidote. And it is short on spiders.
“We have tried to catch enough spiders ourselves and we just can’t,” Tim Faulkner, a member of the zoo’s antivenom program, told Reuters. In a video posted to the Australian Reptile Park’s Facebook page on Monday, the zoo called on the adult Australian public to help refill the venom stocks by donating wild-caught spiders.
The shortage did not impact Donagh’s survival. But she first had to face a harrowing ordeal: While on the phone with a nurse, Donagh’s face and lips started to go numb. While waiting for emergency responders to arrive, she broke out in a heavy sweat. While in the ambulance to Bowral Hospital, gripping the paramedic’s hand, Donagh lost consciousness.
A supply of funnel-web spider antidote was rushed to hospital. Doctors reversed the toxic effects of the spider bite after administering several vials of antivenom. Donagh was discharged three days later, making a full recovery.
(The spider, which Donagh named Yorick, did not fare as well. Yorick died in the hospital. A nurse, attempting to poke breathing holes in its jar, accidentally stabbed the arachnid with a syringe. Donagh kept Yorick’s corpse. “I might plan to have some kind of send off for him, maybe a funeral or cremation,” she told News Corp Australia’s News.com.au.)
“Funnel-web spiders are arguably the most deadly spiders worldwide,” wrote venom experts Geoffrey K. Isbister, at Australia’s University of Newcastle, and Hui Wen Fan, at Brazil’s Butantan Institute, in the journal the Lancet in 2011. The spiders, two inches long and dark brown, are considered aggressive. They do not climb well, and prefer shaded areas; when indoors, they have been known to hide inside shoes or piles of laundry.
Once injected into a person, the funnel-web venom can cause the heart to beat too slowly or quickly, skin to prickle, hairs to bristle, fluid to accumulate in the lungs, muscle spasms, hypertension, hypersalivation, lacrimation and tongue fasciculations, the scientists wrote in their review of four decades’ worth of spider literature. A funnel-web spider bite can be life-threatening, in other words. The animals have been responsible for 13 reported deaths.
But the Lancet review estimated that there are only five cases of severe bites, like Donagh’s, per year. And there have been no fatalities since the early 1980s, as University of Melbourne researcher Ronelle Welton, who studies the public health effects of Australia’s venomous wildlife, told The Washington Post earlier in January. For that, Australians can thank a ready supply of antivenom.
For more than three decades, the program at the Australian Reptile Park has provided spider venom to Melbourne-based biotechnology company CSL Limited, which in turn creates the antidote. The antivenom reverses the neurotoxic effects of a funnel-web spider bite.
“Antivenom is the most important treatment in these cases and should be given urgently to any patient with severe envenomation,” Isbister and Fan wrote in 2011. They noted that adverse effects were rare, with reactions such as anaphylaxis and serum sickness appearing in fewer than 2 percent of cases.
The antivenom program relies on citizens to deliver spiders to the zoo, which fell to their lowest-ever donations in 2016. Wildlife handlers like Faulkner coax the spiders to ooze the venom from their impressive fangs. The handlers aspirate the clear liquid with a small vacuum pipette, a process called milking.
In the January video, Faulkner exhorted would-be spider hunters not to come in physical contact with the arachnids. “Please don’t touch them. Don’t try to pick them up,” he said. Instead, Faulkner recommended keeping them in glass jars, at least four inches tall, with a layer of damp soil or cotton balls on the bottom. (And, of course, breathing holes punched in the lid.)
“Don’t use a plastic container like a takeaway container, because funnel-web fangs can pierce right through,” he said. To get the spiders into the jars, he advised a prodding object at least a foot long, such as a wooden cooking spoon. He demonstrated with a plastic ruler, scooting the spider into the jar like world’s gentlest hockey player guiding a fuzzy puck into a goal. The zoo accepts spiders at various collection points in the Australian southeast.
The Australian Reptile Park was confident such a technique minimizes any exposure to the spiders’ business end.
“We’ve been doing this for 35 years,” Faulkner told Reuters, “and no one’s been hurt.”
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