The wound around the bite site will be excruciating. You’ll salivate uncontrollably like Pavlov’s pups. Your lips will tingle, and your muscles will spasm as your nervous system glitches. The real trouble starts, though, when the venom starts attacking your heart. That organ too will start to spasm, spiking your blood pressure. Fail to reach a hospital in time to get the antivenom, and you’re dead.
You definitely don’t want to get bitten by Australia’s funnel-web spider, which roams Sydney and the country’s east 1 coast at large. But those who do—and survive, thanks to that precious antivenom—will have the Australian Reptile Park to thank. Just north of Sydney, it runs a program that asks ordinary citizens to capture Australia’s most venomous spider and take it to one of a dozen drop-off points in the area. Arachnid in hand, technicians can milk its venom and ship the stuff off to a biotech lab, which uses it to manufacture life-saving antivenom.
It seems crazy and so very … Australian, asking regular folk to risk tangling with the venomous menace. But the ARP, which ain’t exactly swimming in money to hire pros to go out and capture spiders, is the sole supplier of funnel-web venom. It’s thanks to the park’s volunteer spider wranglers that antivenom stocks hospital shelves—since the antivenom went into circulation in 1981, the funnel-web spider hasn’t killed a single person.
The funnel-web spider is one of the most dangerous arachnids on Earth, yet in Australia, ordinary folk help capture them so scientists can produce antivenom. Gary Brown
It’s the male funnel-webs—about two inches long or so, and robust like a tarantula—that cause trouble for humans. First off, they’re six times as venomous as the females. And while the females tend to hunker down in burrows (from which they, awesomely, radiate silk lines to alert them to trespassing prey), the males are nomads, roaming the landscape in search of females.
That puts them on a collision course with humans. When the sun comes up, those wandering males seek refuge from the heat. “Commonly that’s under little bits of debris, in a pile of rocks or in shoes, in clothes, things like that that are piled up around the house,” says Mike Drinkwater, operations manager at the ARP. “So people can often be bitten just putting on a pair of shoes, and not checking them when they’ve left them outside.”
On average, Drinkwater says, the funnel-web bites 60 to 70 people in Australia each year, though only 10 to 20 are unfortunate enough to have the spider actually break the skin and inject venom. These poor souls go through the aforementioned symptoms, and may perish if they don’t get the antivenom, sometimes within an hour.
But you can’t get antivenom without venom. So Drinkwater and his colleagues encourage average Australians to very carefully trap any funnel-webs they come across. And all danger considered, that’s not too hard to do. Funnel-webs can’t leap at you, so it’s just a matter of coaxing them into a thick plastic container (their huge fangs can pierce thinner plastic) or a glass jar and screwing on a lid—punctured with breathing holes, of course. The trapper then takes the spider to one of a dozen or so drop-off points in Sydney and the surrounding areas: hospitals, vets, the ARP itself, and even the customer service desk at the Hawkesbury City Council.
A funnel-web’s defense is to rear up and expose its fangs. Gary Brown
Each of these locations is equipped with a kit that includes all manner of differently shaped containers—the idea being that no matter what kind of receptacle the amateur spider-hunter brings their quarry in, the person receiving it can just drop it in a guaranteed-safe container. So the spiders arrive and get new homes, and once a week, the ARP comes around to collect any new specimens.
Now, a lot of folks would just as soon dispatch funnel-webs that infiltrate their homes, but the ARP receives a whole lot of funnel-webs a year, somewhere on the order of 1,500—that’d be an average of four a day. “Believe it or not, people are very, very willing to become involved,” says Drinkwater. “You’ve always got your people that are terrified of spiders, have terrible phobias. And we understand that, we really do. But there’s also a huge amount of people out there that are quite willing to help.”
And thanks to the spider’s orneriness, getting the venom isn’t all that difficult. Like you may have seen before in tarantulas, the funnel-web’s preferred defense is to rear up and expose its fangs. All the collector needs to do is put the spider in a pen, get it to rear up, and use a suction-powered pipette to slurp the venom that drips from the fangs. ARP milks each spider once a week, and ships the venom off to the biotech firm BioCSL, which turns it into the antivenom that will one day save a life.
Once at the Australian Reptile Park, technicians milk the spiders once a week. Australian Reptile Park
So how does venom become antivenom? Well, funnel-web venom doesn’t have the same effect on every kind of animal. It messes humans up good, but it has nowhere near the same effect on other vertebrates like dogs and, importantly for antivenom production, rabbits.
To produce the antivenom, scientists inject rabbits with the venom, which instead of killing the creatures, induces the rabbits to produce an antibody. “They give them booster shots when they want to collect the serum,” says Margaret Hardy, a chemist at the University of Queensland who studies funnel-web venom. “So they would just have a culture of laboratory animals and they essentially do a blood donation, and then they spin it down and isolate mostly immunoglobulin G.” It’s this antibody that saves the funnel-web’s victims.
Now, the upside to a funnel-web bite is that the victim at least has a bit of time. You get that intense localized pain, sure, but so long as a funnel-web victim gets to the hospital quick enough, doctors can inject the antivenom, which binds to the venom and neutralizes it. The venom does its worst damage when it hits the heart, “so that’s why you want the antivenom to be administered quickly,” Hardy says. “That’s true for any envenomation, because if you quickly get it bound in the blood, then your body just excretes it.”
It’s clever science, and thanks to it and the ARP’s drop-off program, Australians are no longer perishing from funnel-web bites. But beyond the venom’s usefulness in fighting, well, itself, it may lead scientists to advances in another biological weapon: insecticides.
Funnel-webs are ornery, so milking them is a cinch. Just apply a vacuum-power pipette to the venom dripping off their fangs and voila. Gary Brown
Funnel-webs hunt insects, and as such, they’re equipped with venom that short-circuits insect nervous systems, which are fundamentally different from vertebrate nervous systems. It would seem reasonable, then, that science could find a way to weaponize the funnel-web spider’s venom to target insects on a larger scale.
And that’s just what Hardy is pursuing. She and her colleagues are isolating the offending compounds in the funnel-web’s venom—short chains of amino acids called peptides—and trying to figure out which kinds of insects they’ll affect. “A lot of times we’ll see it’s more active in lepidoptera, like caterpillars, than it is in flies, for example,” Hardy says. “What we’re trying to do is kind of establish a database of what works on what.” They’re looking at venom’s potential to target mosquitoes, for instance, or agricultural pests.
Critically, because insect nervous systems don’t operate like human immune systems, the funnel-web venom compounds that affect bugs may not affect us, which could make their use as insecticides safer for people. And the compounds will work differently from insect to insect, perhaps allowing for a targeted insecticide with less collateral damage.
“Another nice thing about these spider venom peptides is that they don’t seem to have any effect on bees,” Hardy says. Bees, as you may have heard, are dying off in droves, and it looks like pesticides may be to blame. But perhaps it’s possible to develop new insecticides based on funnel-web venom that leave bees alone.
Sure, spiders aren’t reptiles, but the Australian Reptile Park likes them all the same. Australian Reptile Park
So the funnel-web spider is far from being a mere nuisance in Australia. Yeah, it ruins someone’s day here and there, but thanks to a bold experiment in citizen science, hospitals find themselves in no short supply of the tool they need to treat victims. And the spider’s venom could well lead researchers to novel insecticides.
That said, please check your shoes if you ever spend time in Sydney. Or keep them in the freezer. Probably best to keep them in the freezer.
1 Correction: 20:00 ET 10/21/15: This story originally stated that the funnel-web spider’s distribution is on the west coast of Australia. It is in fact on the east coast.
