Vale Middle School Reading Article
Are Dangerous Spiders Hiding in Your Fruit? (1150L)
Instructions: COMPLETE ALL QUESTIONS AND MARGIN NOTES using the CLOSE reading
strategies practiced in class. This requires reading of the article three times.
Step 1: Skim the article using these symbols as you read:
(+) agree, (-) disagree, (*) important, (!) surprising, (?) wondering
Step 2: Number the paragraphs. Read the article carefully and make notes in the margin.
Notes should include:
o Comments that show that you understand the article. (A summary or statement of the main
idea of important sections may serve this purpose.)
o Questions you have that show what you are wondering about as you read.
o Notes that differentiate between fact and opinion.
o Observations about how the writer’s strategies (organization, word choice, perspective,
support) and choices affect the article.
Step 3: A final quick read noting anything you may have missed during the first two reads.
Your margin notes are part of your score for this assessment. Answer the questions carefully in complete
sentences unless otherwise instructed.
Student ____________________________Class Period__________________
Are Dangerous Spiders Hiding in Your Fruit?
Probably not, says a new study that shows most hitchhiking arachnids are harmless.
Fruit shipped from afar sometimes arrives with an unwelcome bonus: a large,
scary-looking spider.
The arachnids, which hide among bunches of bananas and other fruit shipped from
South America to the United States and the United Kingdom, can frighten the
daylights out of unsuspecting humans. Reactions can be extreme: Schools have
closed. Homes have been evacuated (again and again). Grocery stores have pulled
whole shipments of produce, as occurred in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2013.
This is because people can be quick to assume the stowaways are Brazilian
wandering spiders, dangerous South American arachnids with a reputation for being
fast, aggressive, and highly toxic (the name of their genus, Phoneutria, means
murderess in Greek). Sometimes, that might be true. But often, the hitchhiking
spiders are harmless—victims of a case of mistaken identity, says arachnologist
Rick Vetter, now retired from the University of California, Riverside.
Suspecting that wandering spiders rarely go to North America in a fruit basket,
Vetter set out in 2006 to determine which spiders are really bumming rides across
the Equator. He searched the scientific literature and asked a fruit importer to report
any incidences of spiders turning up in shipments. Then he spent the next eight
years identifying who the international stowaways actually were, results that will
appear soon in the Journal of Medical Entomology.
In total, Vetter tallied 135 spider hitchhikers, only seven of which were Phoneutria.
National Geographic spoke with Vetter about the most common banana-riding
Drake, N. Are dangerous spiders hiding in your fruit? National Geographic. November 10, 2014.
Notes on my thoughts,
reactions and questions as I
read:
Vale Middle School Reading Article
Are Dangerous Spiders Hiding in Your Fruit? (1150L)
spiders and why it's important to clear up these misconceptions.
Which spiders do you tend to see most commonly in fruit shipments coming to
North America?
The main ones are the pantropical huntsman spiders (Heteropoda venatoria)—big,
leggy beasts, very attractive—they're the ones with the white moustache. They're
found all over the world in tropical areas. Ecuador is where they're coming from in
bananas a lot. And the red-faced banana spider (Cupiennius chiapanensis).
How frequently will you find a spider falling out of your bananas?
We really didn't get that many. The most I got was 15 spiders in a year. And this is
from somebody who's bringing international cargo into North America. But I only
got about half the spiders that people contacted the fruit importer about.
What are the economic impacts of misidentifying spider species?
This has caused, and can cause, some severe economic situations. [Say] you've got
$26,000 worth of bananas sitting on a ship because somebody has identified this
thing as a deadly wandering spider. Or you have 20 truckloads of wicker furniture
from Mexico that they are going to fumigate and then develop a personal-protection
program for their employees. So what my paper is doing is giving information to the
entomologists and arachnologists so they can properly identify the spiders—and
there's also information about how toxic these things are, and it should stop some of
the insanity that goes on when people find a large spider in their fruits.
In terms of the spiders being found in fruit and the hyperbolic response to
those discoveries, who do you think is most to blame for that? The people who
are finding the spiders? The people who are misidentifying them?
It's a combination. Part of the problem is that these spiders are misidentified online.
They'll have a picture that they say is a wandering spider, but it's a photo of the redfaced spider, which is harmless. (See a video of the world's biggest spider.) And
then there's the psychology: If there are two ways you can go with something—
something that's harmless, or something that's potentially dangerous—people
always go down the dangerous route (which may be a survival instinct). Maybe it's
better to take something as dangerous, even if it's harmless, than to figure it's
harmless when it's dangerous.|
Why do you think people choose the thing that is scary versus the thing that is
not?
It's much more exciting to say, "I found a deadly, toxic spider!" than to say, "I found
something that's harmless." I was giving a talk and said to the audience, "If you get
a bacterial infection, do you tell anyone about it? No. But if you think you have a
brown recluse bite, you tell everybody! You put it in your Christmas letter." After
the talk, I was in the lobby, and a guy comes up and he says, "We thought my wife
was bitten by a brown recluse ... and you're right, we did put it in our Christmas
letter."
Drake, N. Are dangerous spiders hiding in your fruit? National Geographic. November 10, 2014.
Notes on my thoughts,
reactions and questions as I
read:
Vale Middle School Reading Article
Are Dangerous Spiders Hiding in Your Fruit? (1150L)
Comprehension questions – answers may be in phrases.
1. From what continent is the produce shipped, and what two locations are the destination?
2. List three varieties of spiders found in fruit shipments.
3. Define arachnologist as used in the article.
4. What is the purpose of the square brackets used in the paragraph regarding economic impacts?
5. Define stowaways as used in the text.
7/8.RI.4,5,6
2. Answer each question in one or more complete sentences.
7/8.RI.1,2,3,4,5
What is meant by the phrase “hitchhiking arachnid”?
The scientist mentioned got some information from a fruit importer. Would this information be reliable or
biased? Explain.
Of the
What percentage of spiders found in this study ended up being the poisonous Brazilian wandering spider?
Show your math.
7/8.RI.5,6
Drake, N. Are dangerous spiders hiding in your fruit? National Geographic. November 10, 2014.
Vale Middle School Reading Article
Are Dangerous Spiders Hiding in Your Fruit? (1150L)
3. Put yourself in the position of the Nadia Drake, the reporter who wrote this article for National
Geographic. List four additional questions you would ask the arachnologist Rick Vetter to help make this
article more valuable and informative for the reader.
(
7/8.RI.5
4. What action should be taken in the event that a fruit shipment arrives in the United States infected with
spiders? Use details and examples from the text as well as inferences to support your claim in a welldeveloped paragraph.
7/8.RI.1,8
Drake, N. Are dangerous spiders hiding in your fruit? National Geographic. November 10, 2014.