Queensland expert says Brazilian wandering spider found in UK family’s shopping pales in significance beside its more lethal Australian counterparts

You call that a deadly spider? Australia's funnel web can kill in 15 minutes

An Australian spider expert has ridiculed reports from the UK of a family discovering the “world’s deadliest spider” in their groceries.

The risk posed by the Brazilian wandering spider paled in significance beside its more lethal Australian counterparts, the funnel web and the redback, according to Dr Robert Raven of the Queensland Museum.

UK tabloid the Mail On Sunday reported that a London couple were shocked to find the spider and a cluster of its eggs in a bunch of imported bananas.

But Raven said the newspaper’s account of 14 deaths worldwide caused by the spider had probably confused it with a number of reported fatalities for either the redback and the funnel web.

Research had linked the Brazilian spider to 10 deaths at the most, which were “highly likely” to be the result of anaphylaxis, or toxic shock, that could as readily have been caused by an ant bite, he said.

The 14 reported deaths each for the funnel web, which can kill in 15 minutes, and the redback, whose venom is even deadlier, exclude anaphylaxis, he said.

The funnel web “classically speaking” is considered the world’s deadliest spider because it “kills so quickly”.

“In terms of speed of death, in Australia we say funnel web, 15 minutes, no sweat,” Raven said. “With a funnel web bite to the torso, you’re dead. No other spider can claim that reputation.”

However the redback is considered more dangerous because its venom is more powerful and its bites more common, numbering at one point some 10,000 a year.

While it also delivers a “minute” amount of venom, its potency frequently causes anaphylaxis, once killing a woman bitten on the neck in five minutes.

By contrast, with the venom of the Brazilian spider, it is “very slow progress”, Raven said.

It was true that the Brazilian spider, known to scientists as phoneutria, was said to have the “most neurologically active venom of any spider”, Raven said.

But only between 0.5% and 1% of the tens of thousands of recorded bites in Brazil have turned serious, which was “incredibly low”.

“We don’t even think about redbacks in that category, we’re more like at about 20-50% turning serious, while funnel webs are 60% to 70% at least,” Raven said.

The Queensland Museum’s head curator of arachnids said the chances of being bitten by Australia’s deadliest pair of spiders were far greater.

“The number of people that get bitten [by phoneutria] is comparatively low considering the number of people in Brazil, whereas the number of people that get bitten in Australia is quite high and it gets reported and the reactions are quite bad from all of them,” he said.

He said the best information on phoneutria bites, a 2008 research paper, did not explore the determined causes of death in each of the 10 cases in Brazil.

“The thing is with the deaths that occurred, it sounds like the bad reactions have occurred from the neck upwards,” he said.

“I’m wondering if those 10 cases, given the tens of thousands of bites recorded in Brazil, it’s highly likely those 10 deaths were actually bites to the neck on which anaphylaxis had occurred.

“It could have been an ant.”

Progress with antivenoms meant there had been no deaths in Australia in recent years from funnel web bites. The only the one from a redback had been caused by rapid anaphylaxis.

Raven said the “strange indoctrination” of fear towards Australia’s spiders in foreign visitors obscured the fact the vast majority of local arachnids were benign.