The Tiny Bite That Rarely Kills

Hello everyone, welcome to Tooth and Claw podcast. We have Wes Larson with us. He has been reading books about animals since he was zero years old. Maybe. Child prodigy. Yeah. He's been making stuff up about animals since he was like four or two. That's true. That one's definitely true. I try not to do that anymore. I'm Jeff Larson. I'm Wes's brother. I'm kind of the brains behind it all. And then we got Mike Smith, who was just showed up one day. He just kind of showed up. Ambled on. And like Mike's like the glue of the team, you know, yeah. Glue guy. That's a high compliment. He's a glue guy. I felt that you claim to be the brains of the operation when Wes was reading books when he was zero. You must have some serious intelligence. I'd say like Mike's the OJ Simpson of the podcast. Just like you can give him the ball and he'll score a touchdown. That's what he's famous for. A little too nice to be cast as the Terminator kind of thing. The juice. Well, thanks for that intro, Jeff. And Wes, you're like the best of us. So I'd say you're like Tiger Woods. I don't. I can pretend I'm him in that photo. He's going through it, isn't he? I definitely don't think I'm the best of us, Jeff. I think you or Mike would take that award any day. But I appreciate. You're saying me or Mike's Tiger Woods? Yeah. Who are you? I'm, let's think of someone who doesn't have any kind of. Maybe Dennis Rodman. Around them. Yeah, Dennis Rodman. That's a good one. In affinity for North Korea. Dude, I kind of do. So. All right. Well, talk to your daughter. I does he not talk to his daughter? Mary DeCarmen Electra for eight hours or whatever. He's she's on the US women's soccer team. And she's like, I feel like I don't have a dad. Huh? She's dating someone famous. The closest thing I have to a daughter is my dog, Polly. And I talk to her all the time. She's dating one of the best US tennis players. Oh, who's that? Shelton. Oh, cool. Yeah, Shelton. Is that I thought that was the country's. No, I think it's bad. Shelton. Yeah, chewed it back and chewed it back and chewed it back. A spit. I think all three of us have spent a fair amount of time driving around this big old country ours. Haven't we? Sure thing. Yeah. Personally, I've driven to all of the states besides Hawaii. I had to fly to that one. That's why you're the best of us. That's not true. And for a little while, I actually had a job as a long haul trucker and got to visit all those states a second time. And I'm curious if you guys feel the same way about this. When I would drive around different parts of the country, I kind of felt like each part of the country had a distinct emotion to it. Like when I would drive through the Rockies, I felt kind of awestruck and alive, really meditative, driving through the desert, kind of high strong and bored driving along the eastern seaboard, like when it's just lined with trees. But honestly, like the place that maybe surprised me the most was how I felt driving through the south. Do you guys kind of have the same like reaction when you're on road trips? Like the landscape kind of dictates your emotion to some extent. Yeah, I think so, especially the desert. Desert mountains are a big one. Yeah, I think it's pretty normal. A pretty normal thing to feel. For me, like in the south, it almost felt like driving through a different country. And I also feel like people in the south just have a really unique flair to them, generally more considerate and just warm. And I have this really nice memory of driving through the swamp in southern Louisiana and listening to CCR like right as the sun was going down and just feeling like super like it was a perfect moment, one of those those like moments, you know? And I kind of wonder if that's how Gaylord Brooks felt when he would drive in the south. Do you guys ever wonder about that? If that's how Gaylord Brooks was feeling? When? When was Gaylord driving around the south? Now I do. Well, in January of 2017, he was on one of those trips in the south. Yeah. I think he felt the same way. Gaylord is a choice to name your kid that. He I think in 2017, he's like probably in his fifties, but or maybe even early sixties, but still even in like, even if you named your kid in 1960, name him Gaylord. That's a bit of a choice. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. My dad always tells me that the story of, I think it was his first grade teacher, wasn't it? Her name was Gay Laser. Which I just. They're building one of those, right, Jeff? Gay Laser. Yeah. He's our conspiracy guy. Turning the frogs gay. I thought it's such a cool name. That is a, that is a really cool name. We had a candy store growing up in the mall called Gaylord's, which was pretty fun. Oh yeah. I remember. Yeah. That was a, yeah. Candy store chain, I think. Yeah. Anyway, Gaylord in 2017 was on one of these trips. He's driving an 18 wheeler through some of the southern states. And during a stop in one of those states, an unknown to Gaylord, he picked up a hitchhiker. And for whatever reason, unknown to him, unknown to him. All right. Oh, so this is a bit of a mystery. I see. Okay. Yes. It is a mystery. Black bear story. It was a great white shark. For whatever reason, this tiny stowaway decided to scurry into the cab of his truck and then up his pant leg. That must have been like a Danny DeVito type. It could have been when he was sleeping or when he was driving, but Gaylord was about to have one of the most painful experiences of his life. He didn't feel the two bites. One was on his upper thigh and one on his butt. But as he got back to his hometown, yeah, on his butt, didn't feel it. When he got back to his hometown of Jackson, Michigan, he started to feel some pain and some swelling in those bite areas. Days later, the annoying pot pain turned into a deep throbbing pain and he began to feel worse and worse physically. When two dark areas that looked like rotting skin appeared on his thigh and his butt, he went to the hospital. As he was checking himself in, he blacked out at the counter. That's unfortunate. It is unfortunate. Well, it's kind of fortunate because they probably don't make you wait then. They probably just rush you in. I don't know because he didn't finish checking in, right? I think even then they probably just rush you in if you black out. I think you got to check in. Yeah, you got to write your full last name. You probably missed the last couple letters. They're just waiting for it. We have no idea who this guy is. Yeah. So Brooks was examined, Gaylord, and when doctors looked at his legs, it looked as though someone had poured acid on him. He was taken into surgery where doctors had to remove large amounts of flesh from his lower buttocks, hamstring and thigh. And he would go on to say that doctors took all of his flesh, muscle and meat and that they cut out tissue up to a half inch from his femur. So they kind of destroyed his legs. Like he didn't really have much left or his legs. Basically, he said after cutting away all this necrosis, it looked like he had been attacked by a shark, not a tiny invertebrate. He would go on to spend two weeks in intensive care unit, an additional three and a half weeks in the hospital. He had five total surgeries on his leg and his doctors realigned and reconstructed his remaining leg muscles. He also did plastic surgery. He had to relearn how to walk and doctors told him that he might always have pain. Wow. Jeez. Do you think he had to relearn how to ride a bike? Because you never forget that. Probably. Maybe not, though. It's probably easier when you have a big injury like that to ride a bike than it is to walk, right? Imagine if an elephant ever learned how to ride a bike, he would extra never forget. That's true. Or she. Thanks for being inclusive there, Mike. Yeah. Uh. All right. Now a second story about a bite from our mystery animal. In rural Tennessee, a mom is staring at the clutter her kids have left in the basement. She's SMHing, Jeff. She's just shaking her head. It's just these kids. Muttering to herself, these damn kids. Yes. Piles of clothes everywhere, toys are scattered all over the floor. And as she cleans up after her kids who just left to go fishing with their dad, she's already coming up with new chore assignments for all three. Of them. But while she cleans. Wheels make it fun. We had wheels. Yeah. That's true. What was your least favorite thing to get on the chore wheel? Dishes for me. I don't know. Weirdly, my favorite was bathroom, though. Yeah. Bathroom was quick. Yeah. I don't know. I got satisfaction from cleaning the toilet after I did paint jobs all week. Yeah. All right. Well, we're just going to move on. While she cleans, what she doesn't notice is the small flash of motion across the floor near the corner of her daughter's room. Her six year old is especially messy and she wonders how long this bathroom towel has been wadded up in the corner as she throws into the hamper and dreams of sitting on a beach in Bali with her husband long before they ever had kids with their kids. Long before they ever had kids with a good book and a Mai Tai. Maybe it's because she's daydreaming or maybe it's just her irritation taking over. But again, she doesn't see the quick brown blur on the floor as she pulls the towel up and away. And she doesn't see it lead to her daughter's discarded rain boot. They're brown babies. Tiny ones. The next day, the kids have finally managed to complete the list of chores their mom gave them. When they get back from fishing, all three are ready to go outside and play. Summer just started. The world feels full of possibility, which we've talked about. There's no better feeling than when you're a kid and the summer just started. They go to run outside, but their mom stands in their way and points to the approaching rain clouds, tells them to grab their raincoats and their boots. As the six year old girl runs into her room, desperate to keep up with older siblings, she crams her foot into her boot as fast as she can and she feels a tiny pinch. Almost like there's a pine needle or something in her boot. She thinks nothing of it and she runs out to play with their siblings and nothing else happens. They have a great summer and she feels totally fine. What? All right. So those are two stories that feature our animal today. You guys have any guesses what we're talking about? Tiny and brown. John Leguizamo. I'm going to guess it's some type of spider. It is a spider and it has actually the word brown in its name. So now I know you guys can get it. Brown recluse. The brown recluse. Yes. We are talking finally about an incredibly feared spider in the US and one that probably shouldn't be nearly as feared as it actually is. And do you know why that is? Why is that less? Well, which of those two stories do you guys guess is more typical of a brown recluse spider bite? That's hard to get to someone's butt. You know, it's true. Yeah. He could have been sleeping there. It's the second one. Most brown recluse bites go pretty much unnoticed. There's maybe a little bit of swelling and pain, a little bit of redness, and then it goes away. That's how like 90 percent of these bites play out. And if you just pay attention to the media, you would think that every single bite from the spider, it turns into this like big gaping black hole of necrosis on wherever you got bit. And there are some. Are we the media? We are the media, but we're hoping to be different than the general, the mass media, mainstream media. Yeah. There are bites from brown recluses that develop into much more and the symptoms from the first story are incredibly rare, but they can happen. And then there are stories of even worse symptoms, which we are going to talk about. But because this is a complicated animal, a maligned animal, one that a lot of people are afraid of, I kind of want to start with a bit of biology and a bit of explanation about the spider. And I think it's really interesting. Sometimes I think you can tell how sucked into the animal I got by the number of windows I have open in my browser. And I have like 60 windows open right now because I just couldn't read enough about these spiders. There's a lot of stuff we're not going to have time to talk about, but we really are going to get into some interesting stuff. I even read a book. There's a guy who is kind of the leading expert on brown recluse. And he wrote a book called The Brown Recluse Spider. The guy's name is Richard S. Vetter. He's retired now, but the book is incredibly interesting. Yeah. You will. You can afford a house with 60 windows because you did the Dior modeling. I definitely did not get paid nearly enough to afford probably even a dollhouse with 60. Even that mansion. That'd be scary. I don't live in a mansion. All 60 of your windows had brown recluses in them. Just trying to get in. You know, they probably wouldn't be that scary. Actually. Eat that ass. Just so everyone knows, I do not live in a mansion. My house is 1,100 square feet. Wow. It's a lot. 11,000. OK. So the media has done this, the spider, a grave to serve to service. And I don't want people to think that our stories from today are typical of brown recluse bites, and that's why I included that first story or the second story, because that is a typical brown recluse bite. Well, if they think they're atypical. That's yeah, like neurodivergent. Like the opposite of typical. Yeah, they're not. Yeah, they are. OK. Wait, I don't know. Kind of a duller than you are. There's a thing going on there. Yeah. OK. Another thing. I don't want people. This is something I also don't want people to think. John Lig was almost five foot eight. I didn't realize that I retract my. That's not short. Yeah, that's not really short at all. So it's a little short. I feel a little short. I just always think of him in the past, and I'm like, he's just a little annoying guy in that movie, but he's not. Yeah, I don't know. Five eighths, pretty average, right? I think of him in Romeo and Juliet, and he's like, he seems like he's six feet tall in that. Yeah. Yeah. So pick a different brown, small person and substitute that in my joke earlier. Cheech. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. OK. All right. Louise Guzman. So brown recluses are medium sized spiders. They're generally about a quarter inch to an inch in diameter. They're typically light to medium brown colored, and their most distinctive marking is a fiddle shaped mark on their cephalothorax, which is kind of the spider's head. Like if you're looking at a spider, the cephalothorax is what looks like their head, and the neck of that fiddle is pointing toward their abdomen. So it kind of looks like the like curvy body of a fiddle, and then the neck of the fiddle points to their abdomen. If you look at pictures of brown recluses, which I definitely advise everyone to do, you can see that fiddle, and it's very apparent. Why do you advise everyone to do that? Because everyone thinks that they see brown recluses in their house or whatever, and they probably don't unless they live in their range, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. I don't know if that makes sense. Humans are lucky we have an easier word for head. Yeah. If we had to say cephalothorax, like when you're doing the final account for like a wedding, it's like, oh, it's like about $800 per cephalothorax. That's another thing that like wildlife biologists and what are the insect entomologists? A lot of entomologists. Yeah. Yeah. Entomologists just make words harder so that they have a job. You know, they sound smart. It's like, could you say spider head? We suck. It's the only reason you have a job. Because they're willing to learn all those words. If a genie gave me three wishes, I'm using one to make tooth and claw the biggest podcast in the world, two to be able to talk to bears, and three to wish for my cat to live forever. But since genies don't exist, I feed my cat Smalls. Smalls is fresh human grade cat food that does so much more than just feed your cat. It helps them live a full, healthy life. 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One last time that's 60% off your first order plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to Smalls.com slash tooth. And this isn't an insect. Let's remember that this is an arachnid or a really unique. So entomologists wouldn't even look at them. They do actually, but it would be a specific subset of entomologists called arachnologists. Arachnologists, I think. Yeah. Anyway, a really other unique thing about brown recluses that you can notice is they only have six eyes rather than the typical eight that most spiders have. And those six eyes are arranged in pairs. So it kind of gives them the appearance of having like three big eyes on their cephalothorax. I could explain a bit more about how they look, but honestly, the best way to get a feel for them is just to look at some pictures. If you're terrified of spiders, you know, maybe not, but we'll post some to our Instagram too. There, I think they're a really cool looking spider, but they are a kind of creepy looking spider too. They're found, and this is an important part of all of this. They're found in Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, kind of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. So kind of throughout the Southeast and then up into kind of the Midwest a bit too. Outside of those places, there are maybe tiny populations in some of those states bordering those states like Michigan, Florida, New Mexico. But people that study the spider don't think there's actually like real population in any other state besides the ones I listed. And some of the ones I listed don't really have many at all. Like the states that have a ton of the spider are like Tennessee, Kansas has quite a few, some of those Arkansas, Oklahoma, those states have a fair amount of brown recluses. OK, the reason that's important is you do not need to worry about brown recluse spiders if you do not live in one of those states. Sure, it's possible that one could hitchhike to your state, but it would just be one spider. It wouldn't be a population. So the chances of being bitten by the spider are very low. The chances of being bitten by it outside of its range are essentially zero. So don't worry about them if you don't live in those states. What do they have them in zoos? They might. Yeah. But you got to worry. I know, I wouldn't worry. Yeah, there's like a Harambe situation with the brown recluse. They have to shoot it. Someone's kid falls in the brown recluse enclosure. She's trying to protect the kid. They make a statue out of it, but it's also just life size like the Harambe. It like wraps the kid in a web and then they shoot it. And then then everyone on the internet is like, no, look, it's just trying to protect it. OK, this spider is much more active in the warmer months. They're typically found in dark, confined spaces, hence the name recluse. This is a very shy spider. There are spiders out there that we've talked about that are kind of reclusive, if you will. Yeah. Like the Brazilian wandering spiders, a spider that kind of defends itself and is a little bit defensive, if not aggressive. This is not one of those spiders. They just try and get away. They don't want to bite. So the Brazilians wandering spiders wander a bit and these ones. They do. Yeah. And there's there's actually there's a South American variation of the brown recluse called the Chilean recluse, and it's quite a bit more dangerous. We'll probably do an episode on them at some point. But our brown recluse, even though it has some potent venom, it's very shy. So you could have if you live in its range, you could have a lot of these spiders in your house or your garage or whatever, and you'd never really see them because they are very recluse. Are these one of the spiders when they made the female kill the dude? No, oh, you better believe we're going to get into mating. Like you better buckle up. You're going to have to take a cold shower afterwards. Let me know when and I'll start. All right. OK. They are predatory, like all spiders. And they mostly eat small insects like crickets or silverfish. Silverfish are that kind of weird looking insect with all the little legs that you sometimes see in your basement or whatever. They can eat stuff bigger than them, too, and will sometimes eat other spiders and even other brown recluses. They actively hunt their prey and with smaller prey like crickets, they'll subdue it while injecting venom. So they'll like jump on it, subdue it like a wrestler would and inject venom. Smart. With bigger prey, they'll kind of do this little standoff until they find a weak spot. Then they jump forward, quickly bite and inject venom and then wait for it to take effect. And then in the book that I read, the author, who again is one of the premier recluse experts, says that if their prey is especially big, sometimes the brown recluse will ride it like a bucking bronco, biting it until paralysis sets in. Just pretty cool. Maybe like a big grasshopper or something. Yeah. That is actually what he used as an example, a big grasshopper. So yeah, that's a good one. Point a point for Jeff. Well, it sounds fun. Yeah. You think they like watch each other do it? Maybe riding something. That's like bull riding, you know, like Mike's mom. Yeah. You got. What'd you say? You got to ride it for 10 seconds and whatever grasshopper kicks the most. Yeah, they probably do. That'd be cool. That's probably where we got the idea. Eight seconds. So for us, bulls, that's a rodeo I'd go to. Their long live spiders. That's a rodeo John Hammett would go to. He's all like watching fleas. That's true roller coaster. God, I always disassociate during that. That'd be fun to bet money on. Flea trapeze, a wee flea trapeze. Uh, their long live spiders and a big part of that is probably because they slow down a lot during the winter. These brown recluses in captivity have lived over five years, which is really long for a spider, exceptionally long. It's nothing. And then another crazy thing about them is they can go over a year without feeding, which again is very abnormal for spiders. Spiders generally feed very often and brown recluses can go over a year without feeding a single time. Man, that's something. That's OK. We're going to talk about mating. I've got a good description on how these spiders mate from the book. You guys got to promise not to get too fired up by this, though. No promises. But you got to promise me. All right, here's the description verbatim. Typically, just placing a male in an arena with a virgin female is enough to get the process started. You guys know how that how that is. The male approaches the female. Virgin's overrated. Not to the volcano gods. That's all they want, dude. If you throw it some loose hussey into a volcano, they're not going to be appeased. Jason only. He's not going to kill a virgin. Right. All right, the male approaches the female and when he senses her presence, he stops walking around the arena. He often plucks at her web, sending vibrations to alert her that he is a suitor and not prey. Then he faces the female, moves his first pair of legs over her, stroking her front legs and an apparent embrace and vibrates his legs while draping them over the female. Oh, man. Oh, it's picking up. It's getting hot. Oh, wait. Oh, wait. Just wait for this next line. Both spiders vibrate their palps almost continuously, which is kind of their sex organs. Stop. Especially, especially when they touch each other. We need to put some like romantic music behind this. Bill, it's pretty standard stuff. So no, no, this is for Jeff. It is hot. This is what I don't know. You vibrate your palp. Palp. Continuously. All right. The vibration actually produces a sound called stridulation, causing the spider moving a little peg or pick over the palp over a series of ridges on the cellocera, making a noise similar. Making a noise similar to running a stick over an old fashioned washboard. Oh, no way. Yeah, that is good. Either partner. It's like in tourist gift shops, they sell the little frogs with the wood thing you have over its back. If you do that, all the spiders around are going to be like these spiders are kind of gasping out of control. They are. Yeah. Like vibrating, touching each other, playing music. Palps. That's pretty, like, that's like, you know, that's a nice scene. Yeah. Then either partner may give a single violent shake to the web or pulse their abdomen. The female then moves her front legs upward and backward, which causes the front part of her body to angle up. The male then moves under the female. Oh, here we go. And inserts his palps into the female's reproductive opening. Typically, both palps are inserted simultaneously. Initial insertions last 20 to 30 seconds, with subsequent insertions being shorter. We've all been there, you know. 20 to 30 seconds is pretty decent. Two palps, too. I like that they do foreplay. That's cool. Yeah. The mating terminates when one of the spiders abruptly runs away. You know that scene in Spider-Man 2, where Toby McGuire makes the net and they're just like both cuddling in his web? Oh yeah, his palps are vibrating, both of them. I bet you that's when they cut away. She abruptly pols her abdomen. Step for step. Like, he is a spider guy now. He is. All right. Well, honestly, like all of our little creepy critters that we've done on the podcast, they're so fascinating that I could go on and on and on about their biology. But let's get into the part that's probably most important to our listeners, which is their bites. Without a doubt, the thing that is given the brown recluse, the most fame or infamy, is their idea that these bites cause big patches of necrosis. Just picture like a big rotting chunk of flesh with crusty dead black flesh around the middle. They have that classic kind of target shape. And the way that the spider is represented in most media, you would assume that that's the norm for brown recluse bites, but it's actually far from the norm. In fact, the vast majority of their bites are completely medically insignificant and just heal on their own. There are a contingent of people out there, most of them people that are well educated in the spider and its venom, that think that it actually isn't capable of producing much of that necrotic effect and that the necrosis is actually just the result of a staff infection from someone who's scratching the bite a lot, which I don't agree with. I think it can cause necrosis. So let's break this down a little bit because it's confusing. I'm going to dispel a few myths and at the end we're going to talk about kind of our final verdict on brown recluse spiders. So wait, some people think that that huge patch of dead skin basically is just being caused by someone itching it too much. Yeah, like a bacterial infection that they get in their spider bite because they're well actually and they scratch and they have like gross stuff. A real sticky poop and didn't wash his hands after wiping and then itched his spider bite with poopy fingernails. Exactly. That's a very graphic example for everyone that was wondering what this looks like. I'm sure it just is. Yeah, one possible. Yeah. Because staff infections can cause similar looking wounds. They can cause necrosis. They can get really gross. Makes sense. Could be he reached in a toilet, touched someone else's poop. That's true. It doesn't have to be his own poop. It could have been you, Jeff, cleaning all those bathrooms. His paint jobs. 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Join at rocketmoney.com slash claw. That's Rocket Money dot com slash claw. Rocket Money dot com slash claw. So first myth that we're going to that we're going to dispel is that these spiders like biting people. They really don't want to bite people. We are not prey for them. Venom is energetically costly. It's very valuable to them. They really just use it as a way to get prey and to and they use it as defense as a last resort. So pretty much every brown recluse bite comes from a situation where the spider, the spider is highly agitated and thinks it's about to die. So generally that involves it being like partially squished or pinned. It can happen like a glove or a shoe or in folds of clothing or in bedsheets because the spider has been pinned against something. It thinks it's about to die. So it decides to bite. I watched a lot of YouTube videos, some from our friend Jack of people just holding these spiders, then crawling all over them, them like really agitating the spider and it's still not biting. Jack did finally induce a bite where he pushed it against his skin and it finally bit him. Well, he's actually done it twice. The first bite, he really didn't have any reaction. The second one, he had a bit of a systemic reaction. He had that little target forming on his hand. Everyone pray for Jack. Pray for Jack. He's OK. For now. Well, thank you for all your prayers. It worked. You might touch some poo in a toilet. He fucking loves these spiders. Really? Yeah. They have really small brittle things, actually, and they're fused together. And those spangs can't penetrate through much clothing. So it's really unlikely that you're ever going to get bitten in the first place by the spider. And here's a few examples of just how like the most protected like Prince would have probably never got bit because he has like gloves and jackets and pants all the time. Yeah. Or Chris Novoselic, he never wore shoes when he played. Yeah. He's the base player for Nervon. Doesn't that make you more susceptible? Getting bit. Yeah. But like if you're not putting shoes on, you have no chance of a spider hiding in there. So everything else. And if you just step on one, it's probably not going to bite you because you're going to kill it before it can. Especially him. He's got big. He's like six foot eight or whatever. That dude is big. Yeah. All right. So he's safe. So here's a few examples of just how not prone to biting these spiders are. OK. An eighth grade teacher in Oklahoma took his students on and these are real examples. Took his students on an insect collecting trip and he noticed a group of students were very busy around some loose bricks. And when he finally checked up on them, he saw that they had collected 60 brown recluse spiders with their fingers without getting a single bite. So these are eighth graders. So they're not being very delicate. They're picking these spiders up with their fingers and they collected 60 without a single bite. Some people in Tennessee caught 44 brown recluses and sticky traps in only 24 hours in their house, which means they had a lot of these spiders living in their house and they were never bitten. The craziest one is probably this woman from Kansas who reported having a lot of brown recluses in her home. So a scientist asked her to trap them and send them to him. And she collected 2055 brown recluses over a six month period. Dude. Her family had lived in that home for 11 years and during that 11 years only once had someone been bitten by a spider. Their finger turned red for a few days and then it healed. That's bad. Oh, so when someone is bit, the venom yield is going to have an effect on their symptoms. So a longer bite with more of that load released is likely going to trigger bigger effects in the bite. Redder fingers. Yeah, redder fingers. Once again, the vast majority of these people are not really going to have any symptoms aside from a little inflammation and itchiness. But now we're going to talk about people that do have much more intense reactions to the venom. So recluse spiders like the brown recluse and the Chilean recluse have the ability to cause what's known as loxacelism in humans, which is essentially necrosis from a recluse spider bite. They have a specific enzyme in their venom that can lead to the destruction of red blood cells and necrosis around the bite site. Once again, there are people that argue that recluses don't have a medically significant amount of that enzyme in their venom. But personally, I think that's a stretch. And I think we're good to say that about 90% of people aren't going to have any kind of medically significant reaction, but a small number of people will. So aside from just that necrosis, loxacelism can also lead to systemic effects like nausea, fever, vomiting, rashes, and joint pain. And then there's evidence that in a tiny fraction of a fraction of the bite victims, that will lead to systemic problems in their bloodstream, which can lead to clotting, low platelet levels, organ failure, and death. So a study in 2004 found that necrosis, that's the worst. Dying. Right. Do you think their bites are worse for us or our bites are worse for them? Our bites are worse for them. We are much scarier to the spider than it ever could be to us. We don't have venom, but our bites are worse to them. Dry biting? Yes. Okay. All right. A study in 2004 found that necrosis occurred in about 37% of patients that sought treatment after a brown recluse bite and systemic illness in about 14%. So you might be saying right now, Wes, 37% is a pretty high number. But the thing is, those are people that went to the hospital after they were bitten. So that's a very specific group of people. That's not all the people that are bitten by brown recluses. Most people never go to the hospital. So let's tell stuff out. Well, a lot of them are probably farmers too. They don't go to doctors. To the goldang doctor? A little bit of whiskey. Working out on the fields in Kansas? Yeah, exactly. You don't think they ever get bit? I think they get bit a lot and I think you're right. They probably just say, oh, it's just a freaking spider. Cut their finger off. Yeah, gum it and then they go on with their day. Goldarnit, patting. All right. They've always got a spittoon. So close by. How is that the case, Wes? They have to, Mike. Where are they supposed to spit their chew? Yeah, it's government mandated for all farmers. Every 50 feet, there's got to be one. You know what? What? I don't really care if we get rid of Kansas. Okay. Really? Yeah. Why is that? Just won't bother me. Huh. I wouldn't miss it. Kind of the bread bowl. We'd need a lot of their grains. We would lose out on some sports institutions. Yeah. Good college basketball. The Royals. Yeah, it's kind of dumb that they split a city named after their state with another state. Like they should really stop doing that. That is a weird move. I'll take that back. Kansas City was cool when I went there. I like Kansas City. Some old hotels. Good food. Still an affordable place to live too. Lots of tornadoes. Yeah, tornadoes are sick. And I think that's actually kind of cool. Yeah. Wizard of Oz. Is it raining? It's starting to rain pretty hard here. Yeah. So just so you guys know, that is happening. It'll add to the mood. Can you have Kansas? Can you have Arkansas without Kansas? Because didn't Arkansas just kind of steal that name? Ark. Kansas. What do you mean? Arkansas. Because if you get spelled. You get root. I don't. I actually have no idea. I've always thought that that was kind of curious though, right? It's like if we got rid of Mexico, then New Mexico doesn't make sense anymore. It just have to be Mexico. It would be Mexico. Yeah. It wouldn't be the new one. It'd be the only one. It's an indigenous name. So yes, you could have it without Kansas. Was Kansas indigenous? I think so. Also an indigenous name. Also now we're in the quagmire again. Yeah. This is a whole conundrum. All right. So now that we've talked about the fact that most of their bites don't cause any kind of medically significant reaction, we are going to talk about a few stories where they did. Megan Lindsay is a name that some people out there listening might know. And that's because she took second place in season eight of the show, The Voice, which is a popular singing competition show here in the US. Well, one morning in early 2017, I don't know. I've never actually watched that show. Who are the judges there? One of the judges picked her. Adam Levine. Yeah, probably. 41. What's the number? She's still on that show. Yeah. Room five. I was saying some 41. Was his tweet that went viral or his message that went viral? Your body is absurd or whatever. Yeah. Your body is absurd. He was sending really desperate weird messages to women. Weird. Yeah. I think that's a point. Anyway, Stefani show too, right? She's probably on that show. Or some, I don't know. I think they were poking at one point. I think that's really mad. They're meet cute. Yeah. Yeah. They sang at each other. Yeah. All right. Yeah, dude. Like frickin' Barron and Luthien. All right. Sure. One morning in early 2017, Megan rolled over in bed and felt an intense stinging feeling on the left side of her face under her eye. She slapped at it and then stared in horror at her right hand because there was a big dying brown spider that fell down from her hand and it lay dying on her bed and she immediately recognized it as a brown recluse spider. Wow. Swelling was her first symptom and then it led to some pretty intense stinging pain that night and then it got worse and worse and she finally decided to go to the emergency room. Doctors looked at her sting and pretty much said there wasn't much they could do, but the sting would likely calm down or it might get worse. And unfortunately for Megan, it got a lot worse. Some good doctoring there. That's interesting. It's kind of. It could really go either way here. It'd be crazy story if she just got better. Yeah. It's interesting because when you see the videos where people will tickle someone's face with a feather and then they always slap their face with whipped cream or whatever, you know? And it's interesting that's the reaction is to slap a tickle. And maybe it's because of this. Maybe it could be. Yeah. Before we had houses, we probably had spiders crawling on our faces all the time. Yeah. Back when we were primates. And even in our houses, spiders like houses. That's that a lot of cover. Yeah. We all eat 700 spiders a year or whatever. Think of how many that was before we had houses. Yeah. Yeah. That's that isn't true. We don't eat spiders. They don't cause we slap them up. Right. Yeah. All right. How many times do you think you've slapped yourself in the face? Not realized. That's something you think we're doing. Yeah. Probably. I think I'd normally realize it. Yeah, I think I'd realize it. Wake yourself up. I'm a kind of a light sleeper. Mm hmm. Maybe twice. Yeah. So if a spider snuck into your mouth, you'd like wake up and you'd spit it out even before you ate it. I'd I'd I would let it have its babies in me. It's a weird way to phrase that. Yeah. That's what they do. Let it go in your mouth. They have their babies. Blow it slow. The babies all come in. Is that what they're trying to do? Yeah. Seven times a year. All right. Yeah. Megan broke out in a full body rash. She got a weird well on her throat and shooting nerve pains in both her shoulder blades and her face. On day seven after her bite, the bite spot started to get pretty dark and then got darker and darker over the next few days. Mm hmm. And she was the one on the voice. But this was after she was on the voice. After a few more days, it's a big black spot of dying skin and flesh that was about the width of a golf ball. I was trying to think of something to like show how big it was. It was like kind of the size of one of those big pink erasers that you would have. So she went back to the doctor. They confirmed that she had necrosis and that some of the skin and flesh on her face was dying. She reached out to specialists. She finally found one that immediately put her into a hyperbaric chamber. And after a few treatments, she found that her necrosis had stopped and she was able to start healing. Oh, amazing. Yeah. And we're going to talk about that. There's really not much you can do for these bites, but apparently that helped her kind of jumpstart her healing. Okay. We're going to talk about two stories of the worst case scenario from a brown recluse bite and both of those happen to be stories from 2014. The year of the brown recluse. What? The year of the brown recluse. Yeah. Apparently is the Chinese New Year animal. My dog, Shanks is an adorable tripod that I recently rescued. He has the softest hair. He hops around everywhere. He has a big old smile with a floppy tongue. And then he has a spot on his eye and he's just so cute. I can't even help it. I just want to hug him all day long. One of our favorite things to do is to go to the local coffee shop where without fail, everyone in the shop wants to pet Shanks. 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And if for any reason you aren't satisfied, they will take care of you. So you can receive a free element sample pack right now with any order when you go to drink element dot com slash tooth. That's drink lmnt dot com slash tooth. This first one's going to be kind of a hard story. And if you don't like hearing stories about kids, you can skip it. It is kind of a rough one, though. On a Sunday morning in late November, 2014, five year old Branson Carlisle was playing outside when he felt a pinch on his back a little after 9 a.m. He ran to his mom and he said something and stung him. And when she checked his pajamas, a brown recluse spider tumbled out. Branson ate his breakfast and kept playing. I think it was dead by that point, the spider. And he seemed pretty normal to start with, but his mom wanted to be careful. So she took her son and the spider to the local clinic. Around 10 a.m., Branson started running a slight fever and the doctor examining him was a bit worried. And that's because he knew that fever was a symptom of a systemic reaction to the venom and he referred them to a nearby medical center. And the doctors there also took his symptoms very seriously. They put them on antibiotics and a steroid. The bite itself was starting to look like a big bruise. And there were dark blue, black and red marks emanating from the bite. Because of this, once again, Branson was transferred to a bigger hospital, but this time by an ambulance. At the children's hospital he was taken to, his head and stomach started hurting badly. The doctors put him on oxygen and submitted him to the ICU. Then as his mom was waiting outside the ICU, she suddenly heard calls for O negative blood and a bunch of people were scrambling. Doctors from all over the hospital ran into Branson's room. And then at 11 30 p.m., a nurse came out, sat down next to Branson's mom to tell her that his heart had stopped and that they had done everything they could. His organs had failed as a result of the systemic reaction to the venom. And he had died 14 hours after having been bitten. Oh man. There's a lot of potential stories, not a lot. A handful of potential stories that I found, probably less than 10. So not a lot at all. Of potential deaths from the spider. I think that's the only one that I can say almost for sure was a death as a result of a brown recluse bite. And it's just incredibly tragic to have your son just playing one moment and then 14 hours later he's dead. It's like hard to even conceptualize what that must have felt like. Yeah. No, that's so unlucky to what you've told us. Exactly. And it's been 12 years, but I'm sure they're still just reeling from that. I will say that as far as people that are a little bit more susceptible to these systemic reactions, kids and the elderly are a bit more susceptible. I wonder if like like it's an animal you can get revenge on. I wonder if you just do the rest of your life. Smush spiders. Probably. Yeah. And you know, I don't think I could really blame someone for that. OK, so this next one, that one is one that I think is pretty clear cut. This next one has a little bit more mystery around it. On June 30th, 2014, Charles and Betty Ann Strickland were at home in their house in rural Michigan. When Betty Ann showed Charles a bite on the top of her foot that she'd gotten at some point during the day, it was swollen and red, but it kind of just looked like a typical insect bite and they both brushed it off. Two days later, Betty Ann was noticeably sick and Charles said they should see a doctor. But because she was a nurse, she felt like she didn't need a doctor. She told her husband she just needed some rest. But another day or two passed and she got a lot worse. And Charles finally just like put his foot down and demanded that go see a doctor. As they're walking down the stairs to the car, Betty Ann complained about a lot of pain in her foot. And Charles looked at it to see there was a lump about the size of a marble. Then she started to have trouble breathing. And Charles called his daughter, who lived nearby and then 911. As he's talking to the emergency operator, he saw his wife staring straight out into the distance and gasping for breath. She was no longer able to talk. And by the time his daughter arrived, she wasn't breathing at all. His daughter did CPR for about 40 minutes. And then the ambulance arrived and the paramedics continued CPR for about 20 to 30 minutes. Before. Yeah. Before finally calling it and saying that Betty Ann had passed away. One of the medical examiners investigated Betty Ann's foot and took a photo of this bite location and sent it to some experts. And within a matter of minutes, they said that it had been a brown recluse bite. One of these experts had the theory that she was bitten directly into the bloodstream. And that's why she had a reaction like she had. I don't buy that. I'm no expert on brown recluses. We've talked about a lot of different venom on the show, though. I don't think it really matters if you're bitten directly into your bloodstream. I don't think there's a big effect there. And I kind of like this is me making a judgment call here. I kind of don't think that this expert was an expert on brown recluses either. And there's a few reasons for that. First of all, and just like a quick preface on that, when we've talked about animals that bite and have venom, we've learned that really there are a few specific people around the country that are true experts about those animals and what their venom does to people. And a lot of the other people actually aren't, you know, toxicologists. Yeah, Joe Rogan is not one of those experts. Oh, no, I'm saying you. Yeah. No, he is not. No, I'm not. So I'm not. I shouldn't. I don't know who this expert was, but I do kind of think that they weren't a brown recluse expert and there's two reasons for that. One is that Michigan is not in the typical range for brown recluses. It is a border state, so it's possible. And there are a few reports of them every year in Michigan, but there aren't a big population of brown recluses there. So it's highly unlikely that she was bitten by a brown recluse for that reason. The second reason that I that I picked up when I was reading the story, everything I read about brown recluse bites say that the bite location is almost always sunken and it's like recessed. So when you get bit by a brown recluse where you actually get bit, doesn't swell up. It kind of sinks down. And then that's the part that the necrosis spreads out from. Her bite location was right was raised and it was raised like substantially. Her husband said it looked like a big swollen marble on her foot. And there's actually a nominomic mnemonic. Say that word for me, Mike. Mnemonic. Mnemonic device. Yeah. That helps you know if you were actually bitten by a brown recluse. It's called not recluse and it has like an explanation for every letter of not recluse. And if any of those things are true, you probably weren't bitten by a brown recluse. So for example, N stands for numerous. So if you have two fang marks instead of just one, you weren't bitten by a brown recluse because their bites look like just one fang mark because they're fused fangs. Oh, the fuse twice. Close to each other. That's possible, but not likely at all. So that's like this isn't a foolproof thing, but it's an interesting thing to read through. And one of those things is elevated. If it's elevated, it's not a brown recluse bite because it should be a shallow depression. So OK. What do I think happened to this woman? I don't doubt that she was bitten by something, but from like my narrow expertise about this, having done episodes about both spiders, I think that it's kind of likely she was bitten by a black widow and they're not like they rarely kill people. Like we talked about how there haven't been any reported deaths in a long time, but they have a really raised bump when they bite that it can look a lot like a marble and people can have these kind of systemic reactions from their venom too. So I think if we were to blame this on a spider, it's much more likely that it's a black widow. It could also just be a delayed anaphylactic reaction to any other sting or something. So I really don't think this was a brown recluse, but whatever it was, it's really tragic. Yeah, that's a haunting thought to have just a barely perceptible sting or a bite that you almost don't even notice that eventually will lead quickly, even sometimes to your death. You know, yeah, it's going to make me and that's going to mess with me any time I feel like a little sting or a twitch now. You know, it shouldn't know like I this this episode actually made me feel a lot better about spiders that like run on the ground, because what I learned is that really none of those spiders cause necrosis aside from brown recluses and even brown recluses. It hardly ever happens. It's really rare that they ever cause any kind of real effect. Why did you specify spiders that run on the ground? Because those are like the ones that you typically associate with like bites, I think, in a lot of places. Like hobo spiders or ground spiders or brown recluses. Yeah, wolf spiders. They're the ones that people tend to be more worried about when it comes to bites. And they're the ones that I always thought about. And I always thought hobo spiders could we have them in Montana they could turn into like a big necrosis like this and they can't. It doesn't happen. One thing I just wanted to mention, a lot of the videos and stuff I saw said that there were no actual deaths attributed to brown recluses. A lot of these like quote unquote experts said that there definitely are. Like this kid in Alabama died from a brown recluse bite. And there are a few others that are like in the medical literature as death from invenomation by brown recluse. So there are some deaths, but it's incredibly rare. But I don't think you can say that like this kid that died in 14 hours died from a staff infection, you know, like he died from a brown recluse bite. Right. OK. Like they had the spider and everything in that. Yeah, exactly. And like it was positive. I saw the photo. It was a brown recluse. Like more than like a great white shark bite. They don't bring the shark in the hospital. Be like, they're like, I don't know. It could have been a staff infection. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was bitten by a great white shark and all my blood came out of my body. But sure. Yeah, they died from blood loss. I think of how easy it would be to get a staff infection in a severed limb, though. You know, that's a lot of that surface area to put poo in. No sand infection. Hands gone, though. Yeah. That's one less hand for pooed nails. That's right. That's true. I got to take that into account. So after all of this, putting all of this together, what you guys have learned about brown recluses today, where do we stand on them as like their general danger? How do you guys feel about brown recluses now? I still want to min my house. I think that's fair. And if I lived in an area with a lot of them, it's not something that I would just dismiss. But like it's I would probably say similar to Black Widows. Like it's kind of cool to see one, but I don't want them in my house. Yeah, Mike, how do you feel? I feel pretty good. I actually have something of an affinity for spiders. I just think they're really, really cool. And, you know, they can be threatening, I guess, in rare circumstances, but never in my life have I ever been frightened or had like any kind of existential dread over them. And yeah, this episode just makes me feel even better, honestly. Good. They kind of give me the willies a little bit, but I really like spiders, too. I just think like they're they're like some of the most effective predators on the planet and just really they're just so fascinating. Anytime we do a spider episode, I think about it for weeks afterward. I am kind of like I'm on the same wavelength as Jeff. I think if I had him in my house, I would be very cautious about them. And even knowing that your chances of being bitten are incredibly small and then your chances of having a systemic reaction are much smaller. It still is a possibility. Like the fact that there's a spider in your house that could possibly make your skin rot away or like possibly have like a worse reaction is something to think about. I would still think about it. So I don't blame anyone that has like a little bit of fear about these spiders. But I hope this episode made you realize that it's not what the media says it is that their bites are almost always completely harmless. And and they deserve to live, too. This is an animal that has evolved alongside us, that has managed to make habitat out of human destruction. And I think that is something that's really beautiful. So I do do like that about them. OK, you guys got any questions about brown recluses before we move on to our categories? I wouldn't want it to bite my butt. Your butt. I think that's where I'd most want to get bit. Mine's already like a little small and I just feel like my pants would fall off if it did the if you lost anything. Yeah, your butt's had its fair share of problems lately, too. Yeah, you don't need any others. Your butt needs a break. The good point. Yeah. It's a belt. All right. Where would you guys want to get it? If you had to have like the necrosis, where would you want it to be? Who to get a stomach? I think Megan had like the worst spot, like right on your face under your eye. That's a bad spot to have necrosis. She healed up really well, actually. But that's a bad spot. Maybe my ear lobe. Hmm, interesting. Just have your ear rot off. Yeah. I think like a shoulder blade would be the easiest. Stomach is a good answer. OK. Categories. Finger nail. Your favorite spider scene from any pop culture that kind of gives you the willies. Fingernails are good answer. Yeah. It's like a little shield. Yeah. Tooth. The tooth is even better. Yeah. You just hear the little like ding as they make a shea off their fangs, make a shea off your teeth. The dentist is just like, I've never seen a tooth deteriorate like this before. Necrosis of the tooth. I'll go first. What is your question? Your favorite spider scene from any pop culture that gives you the willies. There's one that lives like kind of rent free in my head, and that is from the movie Arachnophobia, which I saw way too young and did kind of think the only reason I have any fear of spiders is because of that movie. And there's a scene in that movie where you see a spider that kind of looks like a brown recluse ish spider, like a ground spider that crawls into a football helmet. And it's like a big spider and it crawls into this football helmet. And then the football player runs up, grabs the helmet and puts it on and starts playing. And it's just this kind of ticking clock of when you know he's about to get bit. And it just really gets me. The fact that he's just playing football with this big spider in his helmet. I don't know. That one really gets me. So that's mine. I'll go with spider from the most recent two Avatar movies. That's a great answer. Particularly when he's trying to act like the avatars and stuff. Yeah, he grew on to leave the room when he comes on. I don't blame the third movie. I think some of his direction for what he's asked to do is rough. I don't blame him the actor at all. It's just that's a weird. But like when he's like, what up, bro? What up, bro? And then he starts hitting it. Everyone's and stuff and kisses. Oh, well, you guys, we talked about this, right? That he had to record all his scenes alone for like a year. Yeah, it's crazy. Now he did his best. Is is a. Yeah, it's like a Star Wars prequels. They weren't given the best material to work with. I love those movies. I'm all in now. I'm like unabashedly a fan of the Avatar movies now. I don't know where I'm at with them. I still haven't seen the third one. I guess so good. Like a removed admiration, I guess. Dude, for rang, she'll make your palps vibrate. You go watch that movie. I watch that sounds like I'm going to go with the Ralph Bakshi Hobbit movie in Merckwood when all the dwarves get wrapped up by the spiders. And Bilbo has to save them all. But that's such like a creepy thing to consider is just getting ambushed by a huge spider and wrapped up in its silk and just kind of left to dangle until they eat you. And that always gave me the willies when I was a wee little lad. I thought the spiders in the Peter Jackson Hobbit were like a bright spot in that movie. I know a lot of people don't like those movies, but I thought the spider scene was pretty good until the freaking elves show up and they're just like doing all their little elf acrobatics with the spiders. So cool. Yeah. All right. Three brown things that you love. Mike absolutely loves brown. So this is a category in his in his honor. Name three brown things that you really love. Such a hard so hard to answer. But when they brought back the brown color schematic for the Padres jerseys, it's like the best day in my life. Yeah, I couldn't believe we stuck with the navy blue for so long. And it's like, why? Why does anyone use navy blue in the first place? And especially the Padres is the most boring color. It's awful. It's just really, really bad. So the pods now are often just straight up brown sometimes. And that's that gets me hyped. Yeah, there's a weird part of the sunset at the very end of the sunset when there's this weird strip of hazy brown afterglow that makes me kind of feel like I'm living in a dream state, like a fugue state when I'm driving around or just outside during that little brief five minute window. And I love that. There's just something about that dead sunset remaining light that just like makes me feel a way that I never get anywhere else. So there's that. Shoot, the Brown album by Primus. Sure, that's an extra that's my underrated. I mean, I know we got it's no longer Herb on the drums, but we got Brain that dude's kicking some serious butt on the set. No, that's less. OK, less clay pool. Yeah, I could go on for years, but I'll stop. OK. Brownies, Jeff Brownies West. I love brownies. Oh my gosh. I'm having a hard time. You didn't you didn't let us prepare. I didn't press. OK, I'll go first then. I picked, you know, my obvious one would be brown bears. So we're just going to put that as an honorable mention. Brown sugar. I love brown sugar. Gosh, I make this and I still need to post this to our Patreon. I'm going to. I've made the video already. I make this brown sugar syrup for my coffee in the morning. And it's like part brown sugar, part maple syrup, salt and cinnamon. And it is so good and it makes me look forward to my my like iced coffee that I drink every morning so much. I just love brown sugar. Coffee itself, you could have. I mean, that's coffee. Strong. Submission. It smells. I don't drink it anymore, but oh, it's. Yeah, that's one of my. OK, we'll leave that for Jeff. OK. The inside of a cabin. Mac girls. Holy Mac. Like the feeling of being inside of like a cabin where all the exposed wood, I kind of have that feeling in my shed. It just feels very cozy and nice. And it's because of all that beautiful brown that you're surrounded by. You think that's more tan? It's a shade of brown, though. Tans of shade of brown. I'll give it to you. OK. And then the milk caramel sea salt, Tony's chocolate bar, which is my favorite chocolate bar in existence. I feel so lucky that I can just buy it anywhere these days. It used to just be at like our fancy pants grocery store, but now it's like everywhere. And boy, is that a good chocolate bar. It's freaking you put it on my radar and it's really changed my life for the better and for the worse. Oh, I buy a big one for like a trip and I just kind of nibble at it the whole trip. So there's free. You did Tony's. You did like favorite brown things. I'm trying to think of like my favorite shades of brown. Just like like, yeah, shades of brown that I've seen in like, I love the way coffee looks when it's coming out of the espresso thing, like the like smooth. I just ended like change the shades bit. That's a good color. I love like melted chocolate color. I try to think like poop in nature. Brown bears probably the best, right? What other brown animals? There's lots of brown animals. I'm not a hard time. Well, I guess if you're not counting, Tan is brown, but I do like Elker. No, like a lion's not brown. Elker Brown. I don't think Elker Brown. Elker. Really? Tan and brown are different. Elker. So brown. Capybara or brown. Capybara is a good one. There's lots. There's so many brown animals. Weasels are brown. Otters are brown. Seals. Beavers are brown. Charlie Browns are brown. Yeah. Charlie's brown. I guess that's a way to say that. Latinas. I mean, take your pick. That's fine. Yeah. Penelope Cruz, dude. Are you kidding me? All right. Yeah. Who's the one? You're always talking about Samaic. Yeah. Brown. Samaic. The best. That's the best. We're going to leave this. Generic. As quickly as possible. Mike, question for you. Would you rather be drawn a day armors? Would you rather be dropped into a pit where your chest deep and brown recluses for 10 minutes or have to spend a whole year where you exist in reality, where everyone around you smacks loudly when they eat? Brown recluses. Are you serious? OK, there's no. It's not even an argument. Yeah. Yeah, I think about you. And it doesn't even bug me as much. Well, Jeff, I've got your own question for you. Now I guess I already know what you're probably going to say. Jeff, would you rather be put in a coffin with 10,000 brown recluses for 10 minutes brown or or have to wait in line for an hour every day for a year? Jeff hates waiting in line. Yeah, I'd take the coffin. OK, I think I would take either of the other options for those. I don't want to be in a pit with. They're just deep and brown recluses. If your chest deep in a pit of them, you're going to get bit a few times. What is it? And if you're in a coffin with 10,000, you're going to get bit. I said would. That was my whole answer that you said I could. And would know. I said like the inside of a cabin. That's like, all right, whatever. I'd take a pit full of nuclear warheads armed and ready to explode before one second of listening to that over like lunch today, though, it depends on what's for lunch. You like want to live in like Japan where everyone smacks all the time. And slurps. They do. Big slurps just happens to be the only place that's been nuked. Yeah. OK. You know, all right, being nuked is what I'm getting at. I'll take that. Our next. Our next category, something that made you feel good this week. I've got a two, a double answer for this one. So I had some trace latechase and that makes me feel good until it starts making me feel really, really bad, because I think I'm developing that later in life lactose intolerance kind of thing. I think that's kind of happening to me, too. So then I take Pepto abysmal and that also made me feel really good. Pepto abysmal, it turns out, is a miracle worker, at least for me. It is. There's something about it that just immediately eases all of that kind of discomfort. Do you like how it tastes? The like kind of like the way it tastes. I'm swiveling my tongue around a cup. I'm getting every last molecule of that. It's like dessert. All right. What would you. Jeff, what if like you drink so much, it gave you heartburn? What would you do? Yeah, because it's like, I can't have more. You go to the doctor and your insides are just pink. Yeah. Yeah. I guess they're kind of pink anyways. Do you have an answer for this, Jeff? Something that made you feel good this week? Yeah. The Utah Mammoth one yesterday. That was fun. It's one one now. National Park After Dark are my favorite business partner, Daniel. They won a webby, so that's a big award. See you. It is big. Yeah. Like I think our two that we won are still bigger, but I don't know. Yeah. Best podcast. Did we win two? Yeah. We won a signal award and an outdoor media award. For best podcast, but then they won the same one. You literally have the trophy from one of those. Jeff took it for me. I think I have. I've never seen it. Now I have seen it. Never mind. And then. But yeah, congrats to them. Well deserved. Yeah. Amazing. Definitely. Yeah. And then 420 happened. And that made me feel good too. Yeah. OK. What'd you do to celebrate? I also felt good. It's illegal for me to tell you that. Yeah. All right. Mine. My answer happened last night. I went to a concert. I went to see a choir boy who opened for AFI. Choir Boy is a band that started in Salt Lake and I'm friends with some of them. So I got to see some friends from a long time ago, which was great. And then I got to see my favorite band celebrity. I got to see probably my favorite band ever play, which is AFI. Really? And they ever? I think so. If I had to pick a favorite band over my entire life, I'd pick AFI. Well, it'd be between them and Weezer, probably. But I think I have to pick AFI because I've enjoyed like almost everything they put out in Weezer's been real hit, miss for me. They sounded so good and it was so much fun. And I just felt really alive and happy the whole show. And it also made me feel like, oh, here's a band that has the original lineup from when they started. And they all seem like they're still just like best friends with each other. And it made me think of like the three of us, too, how we can still be best friends after recording together for six years. And it just made me really happy. Like, I love that band and I love the show. And I even like got in the mosh pit and went up like I was up in the front. It was great. So it's not a great time. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, that was my first concert ever was you took me a warp tour in Boise. And I saw it. I saw it there. Yeah, headliner. Yeah. That's cool. All right. Truth and Flaw. We're going to do a truth and flaw. So one of the boys has an actual truth about wildlife. And the other one has a lie. And I have to decide which is telling the truth. West plug your ears. Mike, what one was I doing again? You were doing I forget. Hold on. They're trying to mess with my brain. And it works. I'll just say what mine is. And I don't remember though if it's true or not. Now you did truth. So mine is squirrels can't burp. OK, mine is no aquatic animal has ever been to outer space. No aquatic animal. Well, that's a loaded one. I'm pretty sure that they've taken a fish to space. Jeff is a skeptic. Yeah, through and through. I'm going to say Jeff's Van Halen. Jeff's is true. Mike's is the flaw. It's the Van Allen. Jeff, not Van Halen. Jeff's telling the truth. Mike is lying. You're right. All right. How do you know that's luck? I feel like I've seen videos of them taking like old fish. Look at this. Yeah, there's throwing stuff at the wall. That's true. All on screen anyway. Yeah. All right, we're going to leave that. We're going to do a quick. What would Mike and Jeff do? Let's say let's pick Megan's story. You're bitten by the spider and you start to see a black spot up here on your face. What are you doing? An octopus in space. That'd be cool. I think that's where they came from. Yeah, right? Yeah, they don't need to breathe. I don't think. What would I do if a spider was on my face? If you were if you were bit by a spider and then you start to have some of the symptoms that Megan was having, what are you doing? Which one was Megan? She's the singer. Yeah. Not. I do a lot of makeup on my face. Start wearing makeup. Yeah. OK. Yeah, what's Christian Bale's routine in American Psycho? You like ice his face and does a thousand crunches and stuff. Red light. Ice your face. That's what I'm doing. Get like a CO2 canister, put it on your face. Right. Like the ward room. Move your stuff. Some silly putty and just pack it in there. Do. All right. I wanted to ask this because I want to talk about what you actually should do. Sometimes people out there that think that's what you're supposed to do and it is not. It'd be hard to pee on your own face if you're a woman, especially. I don't have that pressure for sure. I can't get it up to you. You'd have to do like a handstand. Kind of. Yeah. Then I could do it. We've seen that. I do like. I have one. I do like what West did when he was bit by one aunt and make a whole episode about it. Yeah. OK. All right. So if you are actually bitten by the spider, the first thing you should do is treat the wound. So put some antibacterial ointment or whatever on the bite side to make sure you don't get an infection. Next is going to be kind up to you. If you know it was a brown recluse and you're worried, then go to the hospital. What I would advise, though, is waiting to see if you start to have any of those systemic symptoms. So if you start to see that target pattern forming around the bite wound with some blackness and like blue and whatnot, then you definitely want to go into the hospital. And if you do go to the hospital, the most important thing is to advocate for yourself. Make sure your doctor speaks to an actual toxicologist that knows what they're talking about. There are potential different treatment options for brown recluse bites. There's no anti-venom. So what they're going to try and do is slow down those symptoms and stop that systemic reaction. But you really need to talk with someone that knows their shit and knows what the most effective treatments currently are. Get a good, like, clear picture of it. Yeah. Yeah. Because doctors, doctors are amazing. They do so much good in the world. But sometimes with these kind of things, they just are going off what they've read in the handbook and toxicologists are up to date on the current procedures. So talk to a toxicologist. Okay. Oh, sorry. A little bit of prevention, too, just to put this in there. If you live in a place that has brown recluses, try to reduce clutter in your home because they really do, like, dark crevices and stuff to hide in. So anything you can do to give them less habitat is really good. So just kind of like maintaining a clutter-free home can actually really help. It's a good reason to be clean. They, like, don't live in Utah, but I have so much clutter that they're probably going to come here. Well, you can, other spiders could be there, too. So also the other thing you can do is if you're picking up clothes or boots or whatever else, give them all a quick shake before you put them on. And that'll just decrease your chances of surprising one of these spiders and making them bite you and probably killing it. Do you have any ethical concerns over using pesticides? Pesticides are, like, even those spider strips you mentioned, like, that kind of prevention? I used to use those spider strips, and then I felt really bad about it because I just think it's a terrible way for an animal to die. But a lot of these spider experts that I read up on said that you could use those if you're worried about them. So personally, I don't like them, but I wouldn't blame someone that lives in brown recluse range using them. The spider strips, like, spiders kind of die overnight in those things. Or, like, in a day. But then brown recluse can go a year without eating, so why do they die? I think they just die from, like, over-exerting themselves trying to get away from it. But I'm not sure. Yeah. That is a tough way to go. I don't like it. That's what, I think that's what NBA players should be doing. Dying on the court. They're not trying hard enough. That's how hard they should be working. They don't want it enough. Yeah. So, I don't think they're trying hard enough on the court, we always say, but they never do. Literally. When they tried to. That's true. Yeah. I don't, I do feel like, personally, I don't like them, but I don't, I don't really want to get into the ethics of, like, killing a spider because I think it's wrong, but I don't know if I really think people should think it's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Pick your battles. Yep. Exactly. All right. So, Jeff, do you have some nice advice with suffice? I know we had some luck over. I do. Okay. Oh, we got a bunch. Okay. Well, I'm going to do some listener questions too. Oh, I know. I'm just saying, don't act like this is the end of it. Okay. All right. Coro Addy wants to know, bear to the left or moose to the right? Which way do you turn? Stuck in the middle with you. What kind of bear? You can decide. Well, would it matter? Yes. I mean, grizzly bear, you turn towards the moose. I would. Black bear? Turning towards the bear. I retire. Okay. Casey, cryptid, I recently broke both my feet. How do I stay sane? Hmm. I guess it depends how far away the moose and bear are. Like if it's for a picture, I'll turn towards the grizzly bear. Sure. Let's go to this next one. How do they... I had, I was like bedridden for two months. I couldn't walk because my knee watched a ton of Game of Thrones, had a fling that ended pretty quick because I couldn't do anything. And took a lot of oxycodon. So those are the three things I would recommend. I don't think you should do any of those things. Wow. Okay. I feel like I've always been really good at entertaining myself and not like feeling, like I don't get bored, like watching media or reading books. So I think I would just do that. I, so yeah, I guess I shouldn't. Jeff's Game of Thrones one, I don't think was a bad idea. Catch up on some shows that you like, read some fun books, write in a journal. Do all those like things you've been putting off for a long time because you have like more active things to do. You pick up crochet, crocheting. Yeah. It's a fun little hobby. Have you been thinking about that? Or painting. I used to do it a lot with my mom. Yeah. It's fun. I used to make beanies. Yeah. That's like something you can double up with a TV show. Yeah. That's true. That's a big argument me and Wes have had is like, I made him a dark gray beanie and he thinks it's blue. And we argued about that for a while. He's like my beanie. And I was like, I made it. I chose the art. We see color very differently me and Jeff. Right. Yeah. But I would say too, like at my apartment complex, there's this dog that can't walk and they just wheel it around in a little wheelbarrow. So just have like someone wheel you around everywhere in a little like wagon thing. Yeah. Could be fun. Radio. Yeah. What? Cupid Cudding Jr. movie. Push the shopping cart around. Yeah. Yeah. You could have radio. He's available. Yeah. Radio. All right. You could do one of those elliptical machines, but instead of your feet, do it on your hands. How did radio ever get made? It was like at the height of his career too. I love that movie. Yeah, you did. I don't know. I saw, I must have seen it at least once. Radio don't know what pants away. Jeez. All right. All right. You want to do one more, Jeff? And then I'll do some listener questions. Rosie Reed says, my brother is going through a bad breakup and I'd love some advice on how to support him. You know, the best way to get over someone is to get under someone. That's what I've always said. It's hard to out there though. Are you telling him to sleep with her brother? No. Not saying that at all. No, I think, I think the times that I've had really bad breakups, the thing that's helped me the most is really leaning on friends and then spending more time outdoors. And I know those are like really generic answers, but it's true and they have really helped me. So those would be my two pieces of advice. No, and I'd say like a bad breakup. There's normally pretty toxic feelings involved. And you just got to like realize that even if she became interested in you again, like it probably wouldn't be a very healthy relationship. So like, it's over. There's a reason you broke up. You just got to accept that it's over. Yeah. Wait, I got one more. Wait, wait, Mike didn't say anything. Let's say go make some homemade bread together. Okay. Was who? Him and his sister? Yeah. Or the ex? Why? No. The ex is not going to be it. Daisy Kay Bingham asks, how do I act like the boss of people I'm already friends with just got a promotion? So she's friends with people who she was working with and then she just got promoted to be managing them. Yeah. I personally don't think that bosses need to be bossy. So I just think you just act like yourself and just be direct about like when you need something from them, but you don't need to be bossy about it. But what if they like take advantage of your niceness and start coming in late and slack and off? What if your friend comes in late? I think, but that's like a hypothetical, you know, so in my mind, realistic hypothetical. If your friend comes in late, then you kindly tell them, Hey, I like, we need to make sure that you're on time. You know, I don't know. I just think like if you're not comfortable with that, then don't be their manager. But you don't know. I don't feel like bosses have to be bossy. If that makes sense. It's not very good advice. I'm not doing a good job on that one. No, I mean, I think that's why you're a bad boss, you know, I would be a bad boss. I would upsetting people. So one thing I found pretty helpful is to have one on one meetings with it's it's a weird to call them, but like your superior is what you are now. So like, make sure you are still spending quality time with each other, but make it in like a formal setting where it's like, not quite a performance review, but just having a friendly chat about how their responsibilities are going and make sure that they know that like you're still going to be friends and want to have lunch and all that stuff together still. But also there's going to be a time maybe once a week or whatever where there's going to be a formal sit down together. You can discuss things a little more professionally. Sure. Like I'd say some like delineation between boss mode and friend mode. For sure. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. Like your manager now you should be friends with other managers, not other non managers. Not your manager for your years. Yeah. So I would like get to work and you got to humiliate one of them, you know, like if they come in five minutes late, pull their pants down and be like, that's for being late. You can't pull those back up for an hour. All right. That's pretty crazy. You're 0 for 3, Jeff. Not a single piece of good advice. I've got a couple of questions now from patrons. This one's from Gabby and I think this is a really good question. If emotions are defined through behavior and body language and animals exhibit similar patterns, what makes emotions strictly human? Is it our ability to communicate these emotions? This question goes on for a while, but basically what Gabby is saying is, is it really anthropomorphic to say animals feel emotions or it is simply a way to make us feel superior? So basically like Gabby saying, you know, can we really say that they can't feel emotions? And I think the important thing here to realize is that anthropomorphism isn't saying the animals can't feel emotions. I strongly believe that animals feel emotions. I know my dog feels emotions. I know wild animals feel them. Scared. What? What anthropomorphism is saying that we can correctly interpret their emotions. We attribute it to how we feel and how we handle situations. That we can interpret them through the human experience of emotion. I think we can make inferences about them and I think there's certain emotions that come through very clearly and we can guess. But because we can't communicate with those animals, we can't know exactly what they're feeling and even people that we can communicate with, we can't know exactly what they're feeling. So I just think that's important to remember the distinction. We have fun riding a bicycle, but forcing a bear to ride a bicycle like you can't say for sure that they're having fun. Yeah. That's anthropomorphizing. For sure. All right. This one's from Dale. Dale says, since y'all are my dream blunt rotation, even though we've established that Jeff is bad at passing the blunt, I was wondering who each of you would include in your own dream blunt rotation? Maybe do two people. Three. We're three. We can do three. I would want David Attenborough. I would want Benicio del Toro and the Pope. Ooh, that's a good one. You think our newest Pope ever tokes up? I don't think he does, but he probably has at some point. Yeah. I'll go Jeff Bridges, Emma Stone and Steven Spielberg. I like that. I'm going to get just a bunch of actors and film actors. Ian West's mom, just because she gets straight to the point. You know? Yeah. We would hear some shit. Yeah. She would ask the other people some real hard-hitting questions right away. And then I want Vladimir Putin just loosening him up a bit, see what he says. And I think I'll take with that same line of thought Kim Jong-un. Okay. Yeah. Great. All right, Mike, this is a question for you. Do you hand write or type your journal? This is from Alicia. Alicia is really curious how you do it and then says at the end, also, we wouldn't be mad at more journal episodes from you, please. Bruh. So I type my day-to-day journal I'm typing. I just have a running document. But when I'm on a trip or when we're traveling, I always have a little notebook with me and I'm taking shorthand notes that I will later expand into fully coherent thoughts later on in the document. You are really good at it. Okay. I've got a couple more quick ones. This one's from Swakes. Swakes says, Hey, crew, we have garter snakes under our hot tub. Any suggestions on how to remove them? I don't want to harm them, but I have a deep-rooted fear of snakes and I miss my hot tub time. Those are almost certainly snakes that are just passing the winter under there probably because it's a warm spot. They are going to leave on their own very soon if they haven't already. So I would just leave them. They're not going to stay there. Snakes don't have like a fidelity to one spot. These garter snakes don't. Turn the temperature down if they like it because it's warm. Make it an ice tub. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I think just one more for today. This is from Bukko, Debele, 18. My brother says it's too cold on Antarctica to smell the penguins. I argue that since all the penguins sewage is underneath them where it's warm, they would smell super bad. Were the penguins expected stinky, super stinky or surprisingly unstinky? What do you guys think? What was your personal experience on penguin ponds? It was very concerning our first time hitting land because it smelled so bad it was like, this kind of sucks. It was cool, but it was also like, this is really hard to breathe. Yeah. It was. They were very stinky. It's not that cold. Summer in Antarctica. No. It's warm enough for their poop to thaw out. It was stinky. Yeah. A little more than expected. All right. I do have one more quick one that I did want to do. This is someone that lives in Oklahoma. It's Mallory. Mallory says they have a lot of round recluses. A lot of rattlesnake festivals which are hunts throughout the state. And at these festivals, I'm just going to briefly sum this up. They do really terrible things to the snakes. They sew their mouths shut. They essentially kind of torture them in front of people. And Mallory's heard people say that the hunts are necessary for population control and that they use the snakes to make anti-venom and is asking if that's true. Whether or not they do anything good with these snakes after torturing them, they're still torturing them for enjoyment. I think they're very wrong. I hate these rattlesnake festivals. I think it is just human barbarism torturing animals. You can use rattlesnakes for anti-venom and do it in an ethical way that doesn't harm the snake. So I think they're very bad. I have seen some online where they claim to not hurt any snakes. Where they would put them in a ring and let people come see. But they round them up and get their venom. They almost always hurt the snakes at these things. So I would be surprised if they're anywhere they don't. Okay. Conservation Corner. This is a least concerned animal. They're doing fine. Brown recluses are fine. If you have to remove them from your house, I wouldn't feel too guilty about it. And finally, our claw rating. This is a new animal. So we're going to give it a claw rating zero to ten claws. Mike, how many claws does a brown recluse get? Six, I think. I think they're cool. Just like their eyes. Six eyeballs. Six eyes. Just like six eyes. There you go. Jeff. I'm going to give them a four. I don't like my small spiders being brown. Yeah. I like small spiders being jet black or colorful. Okay. I'm going to agree with Mike. I'm going to give them a six. I think it's always impressive when an animal that small can have an actual danger to humans. It's really, that's just amazing to me. Like, think of how mosquitoes. Yeah. Think of how big we are to. I don't hate mosquitoes, though. Think of how big we are to a brown recluse. Like, just picture it for a second of like how big a giant would be compared to them. Just give me confidence. And then the fact that you could bite that giant and potentially kill them, that's amazing. So and I think they're a cool looking spider and I've learned a lot about them. So I do like them. So they get a six. I'll put mine up to a five because I like how they have sex. I think that is like. Yeah. Like, four play and all that stuff, you know. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, that is it for the episode. Thanks guys for listening. I hope it has expanded your your feelings and knowledge about a very misunderstood little critter. Shownuff has Wes. All right. Thanks Wes. Yep. And as always, we've got new stuff coming out on Patreon as well as our free feed. So check it out. Patreon is it's just becoming better and better and we're really excited for some upcoming stuff on there, including my my brown sugar syrup recipe. It's coming. All right. We'll see you guys. Love you. See you.