Spiders Hiding In Fruit

Spiders Hiding In Fruit. Fruit shipped from afar sometimes arrives with an unwelcome bonus: a large, scary-looking spider.

The arachnids, which hide among bunches of bananas and other fruit shipped from South America to the United States and the United Kingdom, can frighten the daylights out of unsuspecting humans.

Reactions can be extreme: Schools have closed. Homes have been evacuated (again and again). Grocery stores have pulled whole shipments of produce, as occurred in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2013.

This is because people can be quick to assume the stowaways are Brazilian wandering spiders, dangerous South American arachnids with a reputation for being fast, aggressive, and highly toxic (the name of their genus, Phoneutria, means murderess in Greek).

Sometimes, that might be true. But often, the hitchhiking spiders are harmless—victims of a case of mistaken identity, says arachnologist Rick Vetter, now retired from the University of California, Riverside.

Suspecting that wandering spiders rarely go to North America in a fruit basket, Vetter set out in 2006 to determine which spiders are really bumming rides across the Equator.

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