News

The sickening truth about eating spiders in your sleep

Picture:
Picture:
Getty Images

By now you might have heard of the "fact" that you accidentally eat eight spiders a year in your sleep.

It seems like an old wives tale but who are you to disagree?

You have no way of knowing what creepy-crawlies are finding their way into your mouth when you are asleep because well....you're pretty much unconscious.

These type of stories are enough to give anyone arachnophobia but if it is true at least you are getting an extra eight meals a year for free.

People have recently been freaking out about this fact all over again.

If you do have a major phobia of spiders or are just petrified of accidentally choking on one of our eight legged friends in the night then you can literally put your fears to bed.

In a completely unsurprising announcement, it has been found that this old tale is completely false.

A few years ago Scientific American did some digging into this urban myth and discovered that it was utter baloney.

For a start, spiders rarely ever leave their cobwebs and if they do they are usually hunting for food in nonhuman areas.

So, unless you have a load of dead flies in your bed it is really unlikely that any spiders are going to be joining you between the sheets.

Furthermore, spiders are very sensitive to vibrations so a big sleeping human is definitely not going to appeal to them.

Rob Crawford of Seattle's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture explains:

Vibrations are a big slice of spiders’ sensory universe.

A sleeping person is not something a spider would willingly approach.

So, unless you or anyone else have actual physical proof of a spider's remains in your mouth then there is nothing to worry about.

Twitter, you can all now chill out again.

The spiders aren't out to get you.

HT Twitter

More: Man tries to kill spiders using a blow torch – burns his home to the ground

The Conversation (0)