By Betsy Mason
Even spiders, it seems, have fallen victim to misinformation.
Media reports about people’s encounters with spiders tend to be full of falsehoods with a distinctly negative spin. An analysis of a decade’s worth of newspaper stories from dozens of countries finds that nearly half of the reports contain errors, arachnologist Catherine Scott and colleagues report August 22 in Current Biology.
“The vast majority of the spider content out there is about them being scary and hurting people,” says Scott, of McGill University in Montreal. In reality, they note, “spiders almost never bite people.”