Ask people to name the most dangerous spider in the world and you will hear the same handful of names: the black widow, the brown recluse, the funnel-web, something from Brazil. Ask which of those has actually killed anyone in the last forty years and the room goes quiet, because the honest answer is: almost none of them, almost nowhere, and the reasons why are more interesting than the fear.
This list is built from the medical record rather than from reputation. Every spider on it is here because a named study, a poison-centre series or a museum record says something specific about what its bite does to people, and how often. The species are ranked by documented human harm: first the ones with recorded deaths, then the ones that cause real injury without killing, then the ones whose danger has been tested and found to be smaller than their reputation, and finally the ones that are feared for nothing at all. The study behind each claim is named in the entry and listed again at the end.
One rule for reading it: this is a natural-history article, not medical advice. It describes what the research says a bite does. If you or anyone else is bitten by a spider you think might be one of these, seek medical attention; that is the whole of the advice this page offers.
How dangerous are spiders, really?
The World Spider Catalog lists more than 50,000 described spider species. Almost all of them have venom, because that is how spiders subdue prey, and almost none of them can hurt a person: the fangs are too small, the venom is tuned to insects, or the spider simply never bites. Encyclopaedia Britannica puts the number of species known to have caused human deaths at fewer than 30. A 2011 review of spider bite in The Lancet by Geoffrey Isbister and Hui Wen Fan narrows the medically important spiders of the world to a few groups: the widow spiders (Latrodectus), the recluse spiders (Loxosceles), the Brazilian wandering spiders (Phoneutria) and the Australian funnel-webs (Atrax and Hadronyche). Everything else, they concluded, causes minor effects in the great majority of bites.
That is why this ranking looks the way it does. The top of the list is dominated by three families and one continent, the middle is full of spiders that hurt but do not kill, and the bottom is a rogues’ gallery of species that appear on other lists mostly because they are big, hairy, or once got blamed for a wound that something else caused. If you came here for the answer to “what is the deadliest spider,” it is the first entry, and the second half of that answer is that nobody has died of it since 1981.
Recorded deaths
Six spiders with a documented history of killing people. For each of them, deaths in the modern record are rare or absent, and the story of each is as much about medicine as about the animal.
1. Sydney funnel-web spider (Atrax robustus)
The Sydney funnel-web is first on almost every serious list and it belongs there. It lives within roughly a hundred kilometres of Sydney, in eastern New South Wales, and the danger comes from the wandering males, which leave their burrows in summer and autumn to find females and end up in gardens, shoes and swimming pools. The male’s venom is the more dangerous of the two sexes, a point the 2005 review cited below makes explicitly, and the Australian Museum describes the component that matters as a neurotoxin that attacks the human nervous system.
The medical record is unusually clean because Australia keeps one. A 2005 systematic review of every recorded funnel-web bite, published by Isbister and colleagues in the Medical Journal of Australia, found 138 cases with enough detail to assess, of which 77 produced severe envenoming, and 13 deaths, every one of them before 1981. In 1981 an antivenom developed at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories by Struan Sutherland came into use, and there has not been a recorded death from a funnel-web bite since. That sentence is the reason this spider is both the most dangerous on the page and not something anyone in Sydney loses sleep over.
2. Brazilian wandering spiders (Phoneutria)
The wandering spiders of South and Central America are the ones the internet calls the most venomous in the world, usually citing a Guinness entry from years ago. The real record is a long Brazilian hospital series. In 2000, Fábio Bucaretchi and colleagues at the University of Campinas published a study in the Revista do Instituto de Medicina Tropical de São Paulo of 422 people bitten by Phoneutria, mostly the species Phoneutria nigriventer. Most bites caused local pain and swelling and nothing worse; about one in two hundred was classed as severe, and the severe cases were concentrated in small children. Deaths in the modern record are very rare, and the same group’s 2018 review chapter reached the same conclusion on a larger set of cases.
What earns the spider its place near the top is the combination of a potent neurotoxic venom, a large body, a habit of hiding in houses, clothing and banana bunches, and a defensive posture, front legs raised high, which means it stands and bites rather than runs; the spider in the photograph is at rest. Brazil produces an antivenom. The name “banana spider” comes from the bunches it has been shipped in.
3. Redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti)
Australia’s widow spider is the one people there actually meet. It lives under outdoor furniture, in sheds, letterboxes and the rims of pots across the whole continent, and it bites more Australians than any other dangerous species: the Australian Museum says more than 250 people a year receive antivenom for it. The venom, alpha-latrotoxin, is shared across the widow family and produces a syndrome doctors call latrodectism: pain that spreads from the bite, sweating, nausea and, in bad cases, days of misery. A 2003 study in the Medical Journal of Australia by Isbister and Gray followed 68 people bitten by formally identified redbacks and found exactly that pattern, with pain lasting more than a day in about two thirds of cases; the paper’s own conclusion is that most redback bites cause severe and persistent effects.
Deaths were recorded in the decades before an antivenom was released in 1956, and there has been no confirmed death since. The redback ranks third here because of that history, not because a bite today is likely to kill anyone; it is not.
4. Black widow spiders (Latrodectus mactans and relatives)
The most famous dangerous spider in the world is the North American widow, three species that share the glossy black body and the red hourglass on the underside: the southern black widow (Latrodectus mactans), the northern (L. variolus) and the western (L. hesperus). The venom and the syndrome are the same as the redback’s. A review of 163 black widow envenomations by Clark and colleagues in Annals of Emergency Medicine in 1992 found the classic picture of spreading pain, muscle cramping and sweating, and one death, in a patient who developed bronchospasm after receiving the antivenom. American poison centres record around 1,400 widow bites a year, and a 2025 analysis of eleven years of that data by Kerns and colleagues found no deaths at all.
An antivenom has existed in the United States since the 1930s. The female in the photograph is guarding an egg sac, which is the situation in which widows are most likely to bite: they are otherwise shy, and most bites happen when a hand goes into a woodpile, a glove or a shoe where one is hiding.
5. Chilean recluse spider (Loxosceles laeta)
The recluse spiders do something the widows and funnel-webs do not: their venom destroys tissue. The Chilean recluse is the largest and most dangerous of the group, and it lives indoors across South America, behind pictures and in the corners of wardrobes, which is where most bites happen. Hugo Schenone and colleagues at the University of Chile published the defining series in the Revista do Instituto de Medicina Tropical de São Paulo in 1989: 216 cases, of which most produced the slow-healing necrotic wound the family is known for, while a minority, around one in six, developed the systemic form, in which the venom breaks down red blood cells and can damage the kidneys. The deaths in that series, under four per cent of cases, all came from the systemic form.
That systemic form is why the Chilean recluse ranks above its North American cousin: it occurs more often with this species, and it is the part of loxoscelism that kills. The spider in the photograph is a live immature male from a population that lives inside the Finnish Museum of Natural History; adults are larger and browner, with the violin-shaped mark on the front body that gives the recluses their other name, the fiddleback.
6. Brown recluse spider (Loxosceles reclusa)
The brown recluse is the most over-diagnosed spider in the world. Its real range is the central and southern United States, from roughly Nebraska to Georgia, and inside that range it does cause necrotic wounds. Outside it, “recluse bites” are reported every year from places the spider does not live. David Swanson and Richard Vetter laid this out in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2005: the majority of verified bites heal without incident, a minority produce a necrotic ulcer that can take weeks or months to close, and the systemic form and death are rare, with the recorded deaths mostly in young children. Vetter’s 2008 review of the whole genus in the Journal of Arachnology adds that most wounds attributed to the recluse, when investigated, turn out to be bacterial infections and other conditions.
It is a small, unremarkable brown spider with six eyes rather than eight and the violin mark on its back, and it bites people in the same way the widows do, when pressed against skin in bedding or clothing. There is no antivenom for it in the United States. It sits below the Chilean recluse because the systemic form is less common with this species, and above everything that follows because a real necrotic wound, when it happens, is a serious injury.
Serious injury, rarely fatal
Five spiders with venom that is genuinely dangerous but with either no recorded human deaths or none in living memory: relatives of the funnel-web and the widows, and one desert species whose danger has only ever been measured in a laboratory.
7. Tree funnel-web spiders (Hadronyche cerberea and H. formidabilis)
The Sydney funnel-web has about forty relatives in eastern Australia, and two of them, the southern and northern tree funnel-webs, may be more dangerous bite for bite. In the 2005 Medical Journal of Australia review, the southern tree funnel-web (Hadronyche cerberea) produced severe envenoming in three quarters of the bites with enough detail to judge, the highest rate of any species in the study, and the northern tree funnel-web (H. formidabilis) was close behind. They rank below Atrax robustus here for one reason: they live in trees in less populated country and bite far fewer people, and there is no recorded death from either.
8. Mouse spiders (Missulena)
Mouse spiders are stocky, burrowing relatives of the funnel-webs found across mainland Australia, and the males of some species have a bright red head, which makes them one of the few dangerous spiders you can identify at a glance. Their venom acts on nerves in the same way as the funnel-web toxins, and in laboratory tissue preparations Sydney funnel-web antivenom blocked its effects, a finding published by Rash and colleagues in the British Journal of Pharmacology in 2000. What keeps them out of the top group is the record: Isbister’s 2004 systematic review of mouse spider bites in the Medical Journal of Australia found forty cases, only one of them severe, in a 19-month-old child, and no recorded deaths. Most mouse spider bites, it turned out, were dry or mild. The specimen in the photograph is from the Australian Museum’s spider display.
9. Mediterranean black widow (Latrodectus tredecimguttatus)
Europe’s widow spider, the malmignatte, wears thirteen red spots instead of an hourglass, which is what its Latin name means. It lives in dry grassland from Spain to Central Asia and was for centuries the most feared spider in the Mediterranean; some historians of the tarantella dance craze in southern Italy think the bite being danced out was more often this spider’s than the wolf spider’s that gave the dance its name. Zvonimir Maretić, the Croatian physician who treated hundreds of cases in Istria, described the clinical picture in Toxicon in 1983: the same latrodectism as the redback and the black widow. It sits here rather than higher because modern deaths are essentially unrecorded.
10. Six-eyed sand spider (Hexophthalma hahni)
The six-eyed sand spider of the Namib and Kalahari is the one entry on this list ranked on laboratory evidence alone. It is a flattened, crab-like relative of the recluses that buries itself in sand and waits, and the venom of a closely related six-eyed sand spider, Sicarius testaceus, tested on rabbits by van Aswegen and colleagues and published in Toxicon in 1997, caused necrotic and haemorrhagic lesions in the animals. That is the whole of the evidence, and it is evidence about rabbits. There are no verified human bites in the medical literature, because the spider lives in empty desert, rarely leaves the sand and does not bite unless handled. Every ranking that puts it at number one is ranking a rabbit experiment. It is here at ten as the most dangerous spider that has, as far as anyone knows, never hurt a human being.
11. Katipō (Latrodectus katipo)
New Zealand’s only dangerous native spider is a widow that lives in the dunes just above the high-tide line, and it is rarer than the people it could bite. The katipō is classified as at risk and declining by the Department of Conservation and has been protected under the Wildlife Act since 2010, one of very few venomous animals anywhere to be given legal protection. Its venom produces the same latrodectism as its Australian cousin; Te Ara, the New Zealand government’s encyclopaedia, records the last death attributed to a katipō bite as occurring in 1901. The specimen in the photograph is from the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s collection; live females carry the same red stripe on a black body, and the males are tiny and harmless.
Painful, and less dangerous than their reputation
Five spiders that are on every other list, and that the research has quietly demoted. Each of these bites, and some of them bite hard. None of them has been shown to do what it is usually accused of.
12. Brown widow (Latrodectus geometricus)
The brown widow has spread around the warm parts of the world in the last century, from an origin probably in southern Africa, and in Florida, southern California and the Gulf states it is now a common house and garden spider. The hourglass is orange rather than red and the body is mottled brown, and the egg sacs are covered in little spikes, which is the easiest way to tell it apart. Its venom is the same family of toxin, but every clinical series agrees the bite is milder: Gerhard Müller’s series of widow bites in South Africa, published in the South African Medical Journal in 1993, found that brown widow bites caused local pain and little else, against the systemic latrodectism of the black button spiders. It is here because it is a widow that millions of people now live beside, not because it is likely to send anyone to hospital.
13. Indian ornamental tarantula (Poecilotheria regalis)
Tarantulas as a group are not dangerous, and the reason one is on this list is that a single genus of tree-dwelling tarantulas from India and Sri Lanka is the exception. The ornamental tarantulas are fast, beautifully patterned and popular in the pet trade, and their bites are not the mild, bee-sting affairs of the American species. A 2014 paper in Toxicon by Fuchs and colleagues at the Swiss Toxicological Information Centre described a verified Poecilotheria bite and reviewed the others in the literature: the pattern is severe muscle cramps that can last for days, and the authors called the genus an underestimated group of medical importance. Nobody has died of one. The point is that “tarantula” covers hundreds of species, and this is the one where the warning on the tank is worth reading.
14. Yellow sac spiders (Cheiracanthium)
The pale yellow sac spiders that live in the folds of curtains and the corners of ceilings are blamed for more mystery bites than any spider except the brown recluse, and for decades were said to cause small necrotic wounds. Richard Vetter and colleagues tested that claim in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 2006 by collecting twenty verified bites, in the United States and Australia, in which the spider was caught and identified. None produced necrosis; the bites were painful, red and gone within days. The European species in the photograph, Cheiracanthium punctorium, is the largest in Europe; the same paper reviewed 39 further bites from the international literature and found a single case of minor skin damage from this species, and none from any other. The dark red fangs are real and the danger is small.
15. Chinese bird spider (Cyriopagopus schmidti)
A big burrowing tarantula from southern China and Vietnam, sold in the pet trade under several older names (Haplopelma and Ornithoctonus huwena among them), and a fixture of “most venomous” lists because its venom has been studied more than almost any other spider’s. The huwentoxins, first isolated by Liang Songping’s group at Hunan Normal University in the early 1990s and published in Toxicon, are potent nerve toxins that are lethal to mice at small doses, which is where the reputation comes from. It is on this list to make a point that applies to several entries above it: a venom that is dangerous to a mouse in a laboratory is not the same thing as a spider that is dangerous to you.
16. Red widow (Latrodectus bishopi)
The rarest widow in North America lives only in the sand-pine scrub of central and southern Florida, where it builds its web in the tips of palmetto fronds, and it has red legs and a red front body with a black abdomen instead of the usual all-black. It carries widow venom, so a bite would be expected to cause latrodectism, but the Florida Department of Agriculture’s Division of Plant Industry, which photographed the specimen above, says that of Florida’s four widows only the southern black widow is likely to be involved in a bite case. It is here as the answer to the question “are there dangerous widows I have never heard of,” and as a reminder that a spider’s danger is a product of its venom multiplied by how often it meets people. For the red widow, the second number is close to zero.
Feared for nothing
Four animals that appear on lists like this one and should not. Two have been formally tested and cleared, one is big enough to frighten anyone and bites like a bee, and one is not a spider at all.
17. Hobo spider (Eratigena agrestis)
For thirty years the hobo spider, a European funnel-weaver introduced to the Pacific Northwest, was the brown recluse of Washington and Oregon: a spider blamed for necrotic wounds in a region where recluses do not live. The evidence never held up. Vetter and Isbister asked “Do hobo spider bites cause dermonecrotic injuries?” in Annals of Emergency Medicine in 2004 and found a single verified bite followed by a necrotic ulcer in the whole medical literature, in a patient whose existing vein disease could itself explain the ulcer; a 2011 study by Gaver-Wainwright and colleagues in the Journal of Medical Entomology tested the venom and found it did not break down red blood cells, and found that spiders exposed to MRSA did not transfer it; and in 2017 the United States Centers for Disease Control removed the hobo spider from its list of venomous spiders of concern. It is a harmless, fast, rather nervous house spider, and it is on this list only so that it can be crossed off.
18. Wolf spiders (Lycosa and relatives)
The original tarantula was a wolf spider, Lycosa tarantula, from around Taranto in southern Italy, and the frenzied dancing that was supposed to cure its bite gave the world both the tarantella and, later, the name for a completely different family of big hairy spiders. Wolf spiders are large, fast and everywhere, and mothers carry their spiderlings on their backs, as in the photograph, which makes them look more alarming than they are. In South America they were long blamed for necrotic wounds until a 1990 study of 515 wolf spider bites in São Paulo, published by Ribeiro and colleagues in Toxicon, found mostly mild pain and no necrosis, and suggested that the necrotic cases in the older literature had been misdiagnosed recluse bites. Isbister and Framenau’s 2004 study of Australian wolf spider bites in the Journal of Toxicology: Clinical Toxicology reached the same verdict: pain, some swelling, nothing serious. If you want a wolf spider’s true relative on this list, it is the wandering spider at number two, and the difference in venom between the two is the whole story.
19. Huntsman spiders (Heteropoda and relatives)
The huntsman is the spider that makes people leave the room: flat, brown, as wide as a hand in the larger Australian species, and inclined to appear on a bedroom wall or behind a sun visor at speed. It is also among the most thoroughly cleared spiders in the literature. Isbister and Hirst followed 168 definite huntsman bites, each with the spider identified to species, and published the results in Toxicon in 2003: local pain in nearly all, some swelling and redness, and nothing more serious: no necrotic ulcers and no allergic reactions. Huntsmen eat cockroaches and other spiders, and in most of the tropics and subtropics the correct response to one in the house is to leave it alone. It is here because it is the most-searched “dangerous” spider that is not one.
20. Camel spider (Solifugae)
The camel spider is not a spider and has no venom, and it closes this list because it is the purest example of a dangerous reputation built out of nothing. Solifuges are an order of arachnids of their own, found in deserts from the Middle East to the American Southwest, with enormous jaws for their size and a habit of running into shade, which in the desert is often a person’s shadow. Fred Punzo’s monograph The Biology of Camel-Spiders, published in 1998, describes an animal with no venom glands at all, which kills prey by crushing it. The chain emails from the 2003 Iraq war, with their foreshortened photographs and stories of anaesthetic bites and flesh eaten in the night, were fiction from start to finish. The jaws can break skin, and that is the whole of the danger.
Why almost nobody dies of a spider bite
Put the entries above together and a pattern appears. The spiders that have killed people are few, and each of them has met the same three things in the last century: an antivenom for most of them, a medical system that records bites and identifies the spider, and the simple fact that spiders bite defensively, once, and inject small amounts of venom. Australia, which has the most dangerous spiders on the list, has no confirmed funnel-web death since the antivenom arrived in 1981, and no confirmed redback death since its antivenom arrived in 1956. The United States, with thousands of reported widow and recluse bites a year, records deaths so rarely that a single case makes the medical journals.
The other half of the pattern is misattribution. Most of the wounds blamed on spiders, in every country that has studied the question, turn out to have another cause, usually a bacterial infection, and most of the spiders blamed for them, the hobo, the sac spiders, the wolf spiders, have been tested and cleared. That is not a reason to handle a funnel-web. It is a reason to be more afraid of the mosquito, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, than of anything on this page.
If this was the kind of list you like, the natural world section of the site has more of them: the smartest animals in the world, ranked by the evidence, rare natural phenomena from around the world, and the strangest cloud formations you can see from your window.
Sources
General: Isbister and Fan, “Spider bite,” The Lancet, 2011. Vetter and Isbister, “Medical aspects of spider bites,” Annual Review of Entomology, 2008. World Spider Catalog, Natural History Museum Bern (species count). Encyclopaedia Britannica, “9 of the World’s Deadliest Spiders” (fewer than 30 species implicated in human deaths). Sydney funnel-web: Isbister, Gray, Balit et al., “Funnel-web spider bite: a systematic review of recorded clinical cases,” Medical Journal of Australia, 2005; Australian Museum, Sydney Funnel-web Spider fact sheet. Brazilian wandering spiders: Bucaretchi, Deus Reinaldo, Hyslop et al., “A clinico-epidemiological study of bites by spiders of the genus Phoneutria,” Revista do Instituto de Medicina Tropical de São Paulo, 2000; Bucaretchi, Bertani, De Capitani and Hyslop, “Envenomation by wandering spiders (genus Phoneutria),” in Clinical Toxinology in Australia, Europe, and Americas, 2018. Redback: Isbister and Gray, “Latrodectism: a prospective cohort study of bites by formally identified redback spiders,” Medical Journal of Australia, 2003; Australian Museum, Redback Spider fact sheet. Black widow: Clark, Wethern-Kestner, Vance and Gerkin, “Clinical presentation and treatment of black widow spider envenomation: a review of 163 cases,” Annals of Emergency Medicine, 1992; Kerns, Scheffel, Farah and Holstege, “Black Widow Spider Exposures: A Retrospective Review of the National Poison Data System 2012-2022,” Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, 2025; Poison Control (poison.org) on the same data. Chilean recluse: Schenone, Saavedra, Rojas and Villarroel, “Loxoscelism in Chile: epidemiologic, clinical and experimental studies,” Revista do Instituto de Medicina Tropical de São Paulo, 1989. Brown recluse: Swanson and Vetter, “Bites of brown recluse spiders and suspected necrotic arachnidism,” New England Journal of Medicine, 2005; Vetter, “Spiders of the genus Loxosceles (Araneae, Sicariidae): a review of biological, medical and psychological aspects regarding envenomations,” Journal of Arachnology, 2008. Tree funnel-webs: Isbister et al., Medical Journal of Australia, 2005 (as above). Mouse spiders: Isbister, “Mouse spider bites (Missulena spp.) and their medical importance: a systematic review,” Medical Journal of Australia, 2004; Rash, Birinyi-Strachan, Nicholson and Hodgson, “Neurotoxic activity of venom from the Australian eastern mouse spider (Missulena bradleyi) involves modulation of sodium channel gating,” British Journal of Pharmacology, 2000. Mediterranean black widow: Maretić, “Latrodectism: variations in clinical manifestations provoked by Latrodectus species of spiders,” Toxicon, 1983. Six-eyed sand spider: van Aswegen, van Rooyen, van der Nest et al., “Venom of a six-eyed crab spider, Sicarius testaceus (Purcell, 1908), causes necrotic and haemorrhagic lesions in the rabbit,” Toxicon, 1997. Katipō: New Zealand Department of Conservation, katipō threat classification; New Zealand Wildlife Act protection, 2010; Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, “Spiders and other arachnids.” Brown widow: Müller, “Black and brown widow spider bites in South Africa: a series of 45 cases,” South African Medical Journal, 1993. Indian ornamental tarantula: Fuchs, von Dechend, Mordasini, Ceschi and Nentwig, “A verified spider bite and a review of the literature confirm Indian ornamental tree spiders (Poecilotheria species) as underestimated theraphosids of medical importance,” Toxicon, 2014. Yellow sac spiders: Vetter, Isbister, Bush and Boutin, “Verified bites by yellow sac spiders (genus Cheiracanthium) in the United States and Australia: where is the necrosis?,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 2006. Chinese bird spider: Liang and colleagues, “Properties and amino acid sequence of huwentoxin-I, a neurotoxin purified from the venom of the Chinese bird spider Selenocosmia huwena,” Toxicon, 1993. Red widow: Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Division of Plant Industry, Latrodectus bishopi. Hobo spider: Vetter and Isbister, “Do hobo spider bites cause dermonecrotic injuries?,” Annals of Emergency Medicine, 2004; Gaver-Wainwright, Zack, Foradori and Lavine, “Misdiagnosis of spider bites: bacterial associates, mechanical pathogen transfer, and hemolytic potential of venom from the hobo spider (Tegenaria agrestis),” Journal of Medical Entomology, 2011; United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, venomous spiders (hobo spider removed, 2017). Wolf spiders: Ribeiro, Jorge, Piesco and Nishioka, “Wolf spider bites in São Paulo, Brazil: a clinical and epidemiological study of 515 cases,” Toxicon, 1990; Isbister and Framenau, “Australian wolf spider bites (Lycosidae): clinical effects and influence of species on bite circumstances,” Journal of Toxicology: Clinical Toxicology, 2004. Huntsman spiders: Isbister and Hirst, “A prospective study of definite bites by spiders of the family Sparassidae (huntsmen spiders) with identification to species level,” Toxicon, 2003. Camel spiders: Punzo, The Biology of Camel-Spiders (Arachnida, Solifugae), Kluwer, 1998. Mosquito deaths: World Health Organization, World Malaria Report.
Image credits
Images are Creative Commons licensed or public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Attribution where the licence requires it: Brazilian wandering spider, Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (CC BY-SA 4.0). Redback, Toby Hudson (CC BY-SA 3.0). Black widow, Chuck Evans (CC BY 2.5). Chilean recluse, Ssiltane (CC BY-SA 4.0). Six-eyed sand spider, Peter Webb (CC BY 4.0). Mouse spider, Toby Hudson (CC BY-SA 3.0 AU). Southern tree funnel-web, Alan Couch (CC BY 2.0). Brown widow, Bernard Dupont (CC BY-SA 2.0). Yellow sac spider, Colombonereto (CC BY-SA 4.0). Hobo spider, Adrian Tync (CC BY-SA 4.0). Wolf spider, David Perez (CC BY 3.0). Huntsman, Fritz Geller-Grimm (CC BY-SA 3.0). Camel spider, Guy Haimovitch (CC BY-SA 3.0). Red widow, Florida Division of Plant Industry, via Bugwood.org (CC BY 3.0 US). Mediterranean black widow, Sphoo (CC BY-SA 3.0). Katipō, Auckland War Memorial Museum (CC BY 4.0). Chinese bird spider, Syrio (CC BY-SA 4.0). The Sydney funnel-web (Daderot) is CC0; the brown recluse and the Indian ornamental tarantula are public domain.