• Question: Are spiders attracted to nasal mucus

    Asked by yolo98 to Bob, Katie, Nisha, Sallie, Vee on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Sallie Baxendale

      Sallie Baxendale answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Wow! What made you think of that? I don’t know, but it would be fun to design an experiment to find out. You would need to ‘find’ some snot and put it in a box along with some other substances and then add a spider to see if they preferred the bogies to the other substances. You would need to use a quite a few different spiders to make sure that the first one wasn’t just ‘weird’. You could then look at whether it was the case for all types of spider or just some species. At the end you could do some statistical tests on your data to see if the spiders really were attracted to the mucus, more than you would expect than chance.

    • Photo: Vee Mitchell

      Vee Mitchell answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      I think it’s more likely that they just like to haul up in dark places especially when they are scared. When a spider runs towards you it’s actually running into your shadow to hide – not heading to savage your ankle. They are generally more scared of you than we should be of them.

    • Photo: Bob Bonwick

      Bob Bonwick answered on 3 Jul 2012:

      I’m not sure whats more disturbing, the question, or the though of a spider hunting my bogeys! The spiders are looking for small dark damp spaces, unfortunately our noses are just that! But I don’t remember having a spider up my nose each night!

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