Broadly speaking, spiders aren’t dangerous. There are 45,000 species of spider worldwide, but only around 30 can inflict a serious bite.
So, you can take any random spider and say with 99.9 per cent confidence that it’s not dangerous.
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Even in Australia, the last recorded spider bite fatality was in 2018 and the one before that was in 1979, although this is partly due to effective antivenom treatment.
In the UK, only 12 of the 650 native species have fangs that can pierce human skin.
None are worse than a wasp sting, but there isn’t a single identifying feature to tell them apart from harmless species.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Aimee Barrett, via email) 'How can you tell if a spider is dangerous?'
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