The Sydney funnel web spider is the deadliest spider on earth. Actually, let me correct that. It was, until a new species of the Sydney funnel web was recently discovered.
The original wasn’t exactly a species to be toyed with. Just last month, a so-called miracle baby - born from a transplanted uterus - was left in critical condition after being bitten by one. But the new species is - and here I’ll quote our science reporter, Angus Dalton - “a certified monster.”
Today, Angus joins me to discuss how deadly this new funnel web is. And why we don’t know exactly where it is.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Selinger Morris. It's Wednesday, January 15th. The Sydney funnel web spider is the deadliest spider on Earth. Actually, let me correct that. It was until a new species of the Sydney funnel web was recently discovered. The original wasn't exactly a species to be toyed with. Just last month, a so-called miracle baby born from a transplanted uterus was left in critical condition after being bitten by one. But the new species is. And here I'm going to quote our science reporter, Angus Dalton, a certified monster. Today, Angus joins me to discuss how deadly this new funnel web is and why we don't know exactly where it is. So, Angus, you have just written about a new species of the funnel web spider, and I think I can confidently say I speak for I'm going to say all our listeners when I say what is happening. So give us the details.
Yes. The round feedback to this story was, oh, that was such an interesting story. I really wish I didn't read that. That's right.
Now you're haunting my nightmares. Thank you.
Yes, absolutely. So an international team of scientists, including researchers from the Australian Museum and Flinders University, published a paper this week confirming that the Sydney funnel web, the world's deadliest spider, is in fact three different species. And one of the spiders in particular is brand new to science. So you've got the classic Sydney funnel web, Atrax robustus, which lives all over Sydney, but particularly on the Northern Beaches and the North Shore. So that's the one that's sort of the reputation for haunting backyard pools, because, horrifyingly, they can survive underwater for many hours. Um, but this research actually found there's another very similar species, almost identical, actually, with a wider and more South skewing distribution. Distributions. And then there's this brand new species, Atrax kristenseni, or the Big Boy is what they're calling it, which is completely new to science and is a certified monster.
Okay. Well, let's get into this then, because it's much bigger than the OG Funnelweb, I guess we'd call it the Sydney Funnel web. They think it's deadlier. So how big are we talking about and how deadly potentially are we talking about?
Yeah. So Sydney, funnel webs, even though they are the most venomous spiders on Earth, aren't that massive. The males, which are six times more deadly than females, usually only have body sizes of about 2.5cm and a leg span of about six centimetres. But this story actually starts at the Australian Reptile Park, north of Sydney near Gosford. And just over the years these spiders were coming in that just seemed massive, like they barely fit in the parks holding jars. So these funnel webs are getting mistaken for Huntsman's. They were so big. And when these bigger spiders walked across the top, you could hear their footsteps. So Sydney funnel webs mightn't even be as big as sort of like a 50 cent coin, for example. But these ones were way bigger than that and potentially even as big as a men's palm, which is massive for a Sydney funnel web. So this sort of became a sport for the Reptile park's media team, who started feeding photos and footage of these extra large Sydney funnel webs to the media. And the world went crazy for it, like there were these international headlines like meat Colossus, the King of all funnel Webs, the largest ever found.
He's big, he's black, and he's deadly. The largest funnel web spider in history.
And then the next summer, there'd be Mega spider. He's even bigger. And then in 2021, it was Hercules, this eight centimetre spider that could pierce a fingernail with his fangs.
Hercules the Spider sets a new record for the largest funnel web ever found. It's already one of the most literally.
Just in the last week, the park announced their biggest funnel web ever. A A 9.2cm Goliath, and they've called it Hemsworth after everyone's favourite hunky Australian Hollywood brothers. But little did we all know that scientists were racing behind the scenes, dissecting specimens, sending DNA for testing in Germany to prove that these massive spiders were, in fact, a brand new species.
And so tell us about this new species that it's been found because they do think it's deadlier. So why is it just because it's massive?
Yes. This is the interesting thing. So the new species is the Newcastle Funnelweb. So it comes from 25km around Newcastle. And the reason it's deadlier is directly related to its size, which is really interesting. So I mean the obvious thing is it's bigger, it's got bigger venom glands. It's could therefore sort of theoretically inject more venom. But also I spoke to Professor Geoff Isbister, who's a clinical toxicologist at the University of Newcastle who oversees a lot of funnel web bites across New South Wales. He told me that the Sydney funnel web doesn't actually always inject venom. In fact, most of the time it's a dry bite, so the spiders don't want to waste their venom on a human right. They only inject or envenomate someone about 10 to 25% of the time. But here's the catch. He told me that from what we know about funnel webs, the biggest species are more likely to inject venom. So, for example, there are three funnel web species up and down the coast. They're not as deadly as the Sydney funnel web, but they are bigger. And those spiders inject venom into their victims, more like 75% of the time. So based on that, Isbister told me that if you translate that to the Newcastle funnel web, yes, the biggest spiders are more likely to inject enough venom to cause envenoming. I suspect what they're calling the big boy is more likely to be dangerous, he told me. For that reason.
Okay, so, so far, so horrifying. But how does this practically play out? Like, maybe you can just briefly tell us how deadly is the classic or the original Sydney funnel web compared to this, this new species, the Newcastle funnel web. Like what would happen to you?
Yeah. I mean, they're known as the world's deadliest or the world's most venomous spider. Just because they can kill a human so quickly in about 15 minutes. Um, funnel web bites normally occur during summer as males sort of emerge from their burrows to seek mates, and they start wandering. Their venom is highly neurotoxic. It attacks our nervous system and basically forces our nerves to stay switched on. So they keep firing and firing and firing and firing in this deadly overdrive that induces muscle spasms, profuse sweating, tears, a rapid pulse, and sometimes very, very swift death. Like I said, within 15 minutes. Um, but here's the weird thing. It's kind of an evolutionary fluke that we're so vulnerable to this venom. Funnel webs eat insects. So the venom is geared towards killing insects, but due to biochemical chance, their venom is super deadly to all primates, which includes us humans. So your dog or cat would probably be fine if they were bitten by a funnel web. But the owner? Not so much. And this season, there was already a baby bitten on the finger, which is a wild story. So Kirsty Bryant, who was Australia's first uterus transplant recipient, gave birth to this miracle baby Henry about a year ago. And it was this massive deal. There were all these news stories. The womb had been donated by Kirsty's mother.
The first baby in Australia born via a uterus transplant. His mum, 30 year old Kirsty Bryant, undergoing surgery and.
The birth represented this amazing medical development. But earlier this summer, Kirsty looked over at Henry and there was a big black spider running up and down his arm. And then he just started screaming. He had blood in his finger. He started vomiting all over Kirsty as she rang 000 and actually got onto a New South Wales Ambulance call centre trainee who by all accounts, handled the situation brilliantly. Um Henry was rushed to hospital in a critical condition. He was attended by two paramedic teams, pumped with three vials of antivenom and he survived. So these bites can be incredibly serious in saying that no one has died of a funnel web bite since the antivenom was developed in 1981. But the message is that if you've been bitten by a big black spider, get to a hospital and get that antivenom.
We'll be right back. Now, Angus, I really want to turn now to how we can protect our listeners from potentially ever encountering one of these new Newcastle funnel webs, because we don't actually know its exact location. Is that right? And also, how can that be? That's that's a bit of a worry.
Yeah. So this is the interesting thing. So if you look at a map in this research, it sort of dots out where every single specimen they looked at across the three different species was discovered. So you can see precisely where all of these Sydney funnel webs were found. But they have actually purposefully rescinded that information and kept it secret in terms of the new Newcastle species, because Doctor Helen Smith, who's an arachnologist at the Australian Museum who is the co-author of this research. She said that they were really worried about collectors going in and trying to find specimens of this new species, which could make a massive dent in the population. She said that, you know, this is going to create a lot of hype, I guess, in the in the arachnid loving world, and people will want to potentially go in to these habitats and collect specimens of the new Newcastle Funnelweb. So that is a scientific sort of decision to rescind the actual specific locations of where the Newcastle Funnelweb lives to actually protect the population.
Wow. Okay. And so what do we know about the likelihood of the funnel web, whether it's the new species or the original species traveling outside of New South Wales? Like, is this something that listeners outside of New South Wales should be on alert for?
Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's a big risk. I mean, I think it's extraordinary at all that, you know, the distribution of the world's deadliest spider just happens to overlay with the, you know, one of the of the most populated areas of Australia Australia at all. But they're not likely to travel very far. They're actually already 30 to 40 species of funnel web around Australia already. The only places without them seem to be the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Um, and yeah, even though the the Sydney funnel web males do wander around, they're not migratory like the reason the Sydney funnel web diversified into these three different species actually was uh, because the New South Wales coast diversified over millennia during cycles of dry and wet climates. And when the landscape dried out, spiders probably retreated to very isolated gullies, interbreeding in these moist havens and becoming distinct species. So part of the reason that they became these new species is because they don't travel very far.
Okay, Angus, I really wanted to ask you about the man who essentially discovered this new species of funnel web, because he's got a very unusual story. So tell me about who this person is and how they actually found this monster of a spider.
Yes. So he is absolutely the star of the show. He worked at the Australian Reptile Park for two decades. This man, Kane Christiansen. He actually started in 2003. He saw an ad in the newspaper of a big sort of reared up Sydney funnel web, and it was calling for retirees actually to come and volunteer at the reptile park and, and volunteer to wrangle the funnel webs and milk them for the antivenom. They're the only facility that milks funnel webs for their venom. So we can have that life saving antivenom. So the park gets people to hand spiders in. They breed them. They have to milk about 36 spiders to make one vial of antivenom. So it's a pretty major operation. But he showed up as quite a young guy, ready to sort of volunteer and milk these funnel webs, which he was already obsessed with as a young age. And he actually ended up becoming the park's head of spiders. And he worked there for like two decades. So he is the one who noticed over the years that some spiders, all of them from Newcastle, seemed abnormally large. And because I guess he was he was up close and personal with them. Like, you know, he's he's milked thousands and thousands of spiders across his career. Uh, he was the one that noticed these very subtle physical differences to there were like slightly different leg spurs, maybe. And the male spiders have this sort of sex organ that comes off the tip of their pedipalps, which are these sort of little leg like appendages right next to their fangs. And he noticed those seemed bigger in some of the spiders as well. So, uh, he's the one that actually drove some of these specimens down to the Australian Museum in 2018 and kicked off this international research effort. So after years of this sort of very in-depth sort of, you know, microscopic analysis and DNA analysis, the scientists actually named the new species after him. So the scientific name is Nancy, after Kane Christiansen, uh, which he said was his proudest day after his kids being born, when he found out that, you know, he was going to have this horrifying creature named after him, which I think is think is amazing.
Okay, Angus, last but very crucial question. Do our scientists now need to invent a new anti-venom?
Really good question. The good news is that for the meantime, no. So Funnelweb antivenom is actually a very broad spectrum, which is really lucky. Like one antivenom from one spider treats many different funnel web species and even spiders more distantly related, like mouse spiders. So we're all good in that regard. In saying that, the authors actually make the point that now that we know there's a new species around, it would probably be a good idea to test out the different venoms between the different species, just in case there are any interesting differences in that venom makeup. And if the anti-venom could be improved even further, that would obviously be a useful thing to pursue. But it's still one of the best, most effective antivenoms in the world, no matter what species you get bitten by.
Okay, well, that's reassuring, I guess at least.
Absolutely. We'll take that. We'll take we'll take that from this litany of horror.
I'm gonna take that win. Angus Dalton, thank you so much, Angus, for your time.
Anytime, Sam. Thanks for having me.
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Julia Carcasole, with technical assistance by Kai Wong. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Our head of audio is Tom McKendrick. The Morning Edition is a production of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. If you enjoy the show and want more of our journalism. Subscribe to our newspapers today. It's the best way to support what we do. Search the age or Smh.com.au. Subscribe and sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a comprehensive summary of the day's most important news, analysis and insights in your inbox every day. Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. This is the morning edition. Thanks for listening.