INVASION ONTOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 184

why it received the name Tarantula I am at a loss to understand, unless it was
from its supposed poisonous bite.
(Frost, 1890: 149-150)
While Frost was rare among his contemporaries in urging greater appreciation of
spiders, suspicions that Australian 'triantelopes' were poisonous remained just that
- suspicions. In the absence of Scriptural guidance as to their natural place or
purpose, Europeans shunned spiders for their erratic movements or the 'guilt'
implied by the fact that they scuttled away from human approach. Falling upon the
heads of alarmed colonists also did little to endear them in the popular imagination
(see Leigh, 1839: 131; Meredith, 1844: 147). Even where it was acknowledged
that spiders might employ venom to capture their prey, concern that they might
seriously poison humans remained a peripheral conjecture.
Thus, if a settler felt a sharp prick when lifting a piece of wood, donning a coat,
or sitting on their privy, would they associate any ensuing unpleasantness with a
spider's bite - even if they saw the presumed culprit? In other words, in the colonial
antipodes, could a particular spider become visible via its venom?
Our answer comes from across the Tasman. Even before the Treaty of Waitangi
was circulated among their diverse iwi in 1840, M¯ori people had informed the
invading P¯keh¯ of a deadly spider dwelling along the shoreline of New Zealand/
Aotearoa. In 1834, English missionary Richard Davis warned a colleague of these
'noxious vermin, called by the natives KATIPO. The katipo are very black, much
like spiders, and have the property of the bug. When large, their bite produces
inflammation, and sometimes death' (Coleman, 1865: 174). While subsequent
settler panegyrics praised New Zealand's absence of snakes, by 1850 a combination
of personal experience and M¯ori lore established the katipo as 'the only poisonous
vermin in New Zealand', a narrative recapitulated with varying degrees of alarm
over the ensuing century (Hochstetter, 1867: 440). This was not mere provincial
credulity, nor unthinking ethnographic regurgitation. White settlers readily
dismissed the potent tapus surrounding Aotearoa's autochthonous lizards, which
M¯ori believed to possess malevolent spiritual powers (Wade, 1842: 178). In the
case of katipos, however, Indigenous authority legitimated settler experience: at
least 16 of the 25 bites reported up to 1870 - including all five of the reputed
fatalities - were among M¯ori people (see Figure 12.2).
There was thus little doubt that venom was central to the cultural visibility of
the katipo from well before European contact. The M¯ori lexicon contains few
words denoting invertebrates. The generic phrase Punga-were-were encompasses
almost all spiders, casting them alongside fish, lizards and insects as the loathsome
offspring of Punga, son of the sea-god Tangaroa. Standing proud of this generic
descriptor was the katipo, uniquely identifiable through its brown-black colour and
red flash, its littoral habitat and especially its bite. Indeed, the katipo remains one
of the few indigenous invertebrates to receive a specific M¯ori name (Vink et al .,
2008: 589). This semantic schism remained in place well beyond Waitangi.
Throughout the century, 'spider' or 'insect' were used indiscriminately by colonists