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During the past few years it's fair to say the Steatoda nobilis - or False Widow spider - has had a lot of bad press.

Tales of people’s legs swelling up, schools being closed, even household pets falling victim to the ‘deadly’ arachnids have been reported for the past five years.

The False Widow is now a household name, inspiring fear and disgust in readers from Essex to Wales.

But are they really that bad? One man has spoken out in their defence.

Dr Richard Pearce, an Arachnolgist and a lecturer in Animal Ecology, said the first mistake people make is saying they’re poisonous.

(Image: Jean-Philippe Taberlet)

He said: “It’s a really simple point. Poisonous means it harms you if you eat it. You could eat spiders all day and they wouldn’t hurt you. Animals which bite or sting have venom.

“In fact a eating a lightly-bruised spider between two slices of brown bread used to be an old wives’ cure for the common cold – although it didn’t work.”

Although false widows ARE venomous Dr Pearce says they will very rarely use it on people.

“They seldom bite because their venom is important to them, they starve without it, so they only use it if they have to,” he said.

“Mostly if they do bite you it will be a dry bite, with no venom, which will be gone after a few minutes.

“Even with the venom it’s no worse than a bee sting – and there is no national panic about bees.”

Dr Pearce is adamant: “There are no reliable documented cases of serious consequences from False Widow bites.”

(Image: Richard Pearce)

But what about all those news stories with gory photos of swollen legs and gaping wounds?

Those aren’t the work of false widows, says Dr Pearce.

“In one study in California – where they do have dangerous spiders – 85.7% of people who reported spider bites were found to be suffering from skin infections," he said.

What happens is once somebody is bitten, they go to a doctor, who may wrongly diagnose it as a spider bite – even though only arachnologists are qualified to diagnose spider bites.

Then the person contracts a skin infection, like MRSA, which causes their limb to swell up. They call a tabloid and voila! Another spider bite story, complete with pictures.

“It happens time and time again,” says Dr Pearce.

“Most of the gory pictures are bacterial infections.”

“I get frustrated, MRSA is genuinely a threat to human health and spiders are not. We’re missing a real threat where there is one and seeing one where there is not.”

Bristol Live is not blameless - Dr. Pearce got in touch after we ran a story about the spiders heading inside to mate. We also ran a story about a bus shelter infested with the invertebrates in Felton, near Bristol Airport.

(Image: Jean-Philippe Taberlet)

“Spiders are always newsworthy because we are fascinated with them, everybody knows spiders feed on other creatures and have venom," he said.

“Because there is this morbid fascination it crops up again and again.

“Arachnophobia is learned, children are not born scared of spiders and news stories like this perpetuate it.”

Far from fearing our eight-legged neighbours, Dr Pearce says we should be thanking them for keeping us safe.

“Spiders are very important to our ecology. They play a vital role in containing pests which would give us illnesses and spread bacteria.

“The more persecute spiders. The more we hurt ourselves.”

Two types of False Widow spiders are native to England and the third, Steatoda nobilis has been in the UK for 138 years. They are believed to have arrived in the South West from the Canary Islands in the mid-1800s in bunches of bananas.

“False Widow ATE my leg” – spiders in the headlines

Branded “Britian’s most notorious arachnid” in The Sun, the False Widow leapt to notoriety in October 2013 with a string of scare stories about “Britain’s most poisonous spider”.

One of the spider’s earliest media outings was in the News Shopper in September 2013 under the headline “Blackfen tattooist bitten by deadly false widow spider.”

The south-east based newspaper warned readers: “An army of deadly spiders has made its way towards Bexley, Bromley and north Kent - and the venom from one bite is enough to kill.”

The story, published alongside a picture of the tattooist’s slightly swollen hand, sparked a nationwide wave of arachnophobia.

The stories came thick and fast.

“False widow spider ATE my leg” screamed a headline in the Daily Star in October 2013.

The story concerned an Essex decorator who had disturbed a nest of the spiders while working in a school.

“At first the spiders retreated, but in scenes reminiscent of the horror flick ARACHNOPHOBIA the creatures started running back towards him,” reported the Star.

“One of the spiders then LEAPT at him as he was packing to go home and - as he tried to swipe it off - plunged its FANGS into his leg.”

The man was forced to undergo surgery and was left with grisly scars on his leg.

The following week it was: “Killer false widow spider made my leg explode!” above a similar story about a hapless water cooler engineer being bitten.

The tabloids were on a roll, headlines included: “Killer' false widow spiders shut down school”, “'Killer' false widow spiders shut down school.”

There are endless articles – the Daily Mirror website has its own False Widow section with no less than 61 articles about the hapless animal.

And who could forget the Wales Online story: “False widow spider killed our rabbit”.