TORONTO – It’s the stuff of nightmares: an Australian man who recently visited Bali claims that a spider burrowed into his appendix scar, leaving a long trail up his chest.
It sounds impossible, right?
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According to two spider experts, the likelihood that a spider caused 21-year-old Dylan Thomas’s longer scar is next to nil.
“That’s a bunch of hooey,” said Chris Buddle, who studies arachnids. “That’s my very frank opinion on it.”
Buddle is an associate professor at McGill University’s Natural Resource Sciences department and has been studying spiders for about 20 years.
“There could be other things that caused that reaction, but certainly not a spider… It just doesn’t match anything we know about spiders.”
Buddle said that it could be a tick or a caterpillar.
Maydianne C.B. Andrade, an arachnid researcher from the University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus, agreed with Buddle that a spider was highly improbable as the cause of the young man’s bizarre experience.
“I would be very, very skeptical,” Andrade said.
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Though new types of spiders and insects are being discovered, there are none that become parasitic that these scientists have heard of.
“It requires really sophisticated adaptations to be an internal parasite,” Andrade said. “There’s virtually no oxygen; you have to be able to chew through the tissue…I have never heard of anything even remotely like this.”
Andrade said that really, more information is needed to confirm something like this, such as a photo of whatever it was that the Australian man said was pulled from him.
So why the spider diagnosis from doctors in Bali?
Buddle suggested that maybe it was a communication issue: maybe something was lost in translation.
Andrade said that she doesn’t doubt that the young man experienced something, but it wasn’t likely a spider.
“Certainly we haven’t discovered every creature that exists, but this just sounds a lot like the old story about the spider laid its egg sack under my skin,” Andrade said. “So I don’t doubt that something happened to him, but I just don’t know that I would believe it without independent confirmation.”
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