Spider expert rubbishes man's 'implausible' claim one laid eggs inside his toe

03 December 2023 , 11:34

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Colin Blake's toe began to feel uncomfortable on his European cruise holiday (Image: Colin Blake)

An insect expert says there's just no way a spider laid eggs inside a Brit's toe after his foot turned purple on holiday following a bite.

Colin Blake was on a European cruise to celebrate his 35th wedding anniversary when he began to experience an itchy feeling inside his sock. The man, from from Cramlington in Northumberland, had been bitten in Marseille while having dinner with his wife but put his discomfort was the new sandals.

When he woke up next day with a purple and swollen toe, he decided to go to the cruise ship's doctor to find out what was wrong - and found out the 'truth' behind his pain. Medics decided to cut the skin on his big toe open with a scalpel, and removed a large amount of pus and unusual foreign objects which resembled tea leaves inside.

A cruise doctor told him the spider had laid eggs in his toe (Colin Blake)

They were in fact eggs laid by a wold spider, a species native to Peru which is now found in the south of France after arriving on cargo ships. The spider had numbed his toe with its bite before it laid eggs inside, meaning he did not notice the gruesome goings-on.

But an expert has disputed Mr Blake's claim and told the BBC that a spider could not have laid its eggs in a human foot. Dr Sara Goodacre from the University of Nottingham said: "I can't possibly see how it could be true at all because I know about their biology.

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"[The egg sacs] take quite a while to spin. The spider venom is not necrotising, it is designed to paralyse a fruit fly." She added: "There is no European wolf spider that could really penetrate the skin." Meanwhile, the British Arachnological Society called the cruise doctor's diagnosis "implausible".

When he got back to the UK, the traveller was given hospital treatment, as well as a course of antibiotics. His swelling went down, and the spider's fang marks could be clearly seen on the surface of his skin, as well as where the toxin had infected his toe. His toe then took on a yellowy appearance as it started to heal.

But four weeks later, he once again discovered a strange "foreign object" in his toe. It turned out one of the spiders had now hatched, and was trying to find its way of his body. He told BBC Radio Scotland: "One of the spider eggs hadn't been flushed and must have hatched. They believe the spider was making its way out - eating its way out of my toe." A final course of antibiotics killed off the creepy crawly, and doctors removed it by cutting open his toe - putting an end to his bizarre encounter with the wolf spider family.

Sam Elliott-Gibbs