INVASION ONTOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 188

fatal, the first deadly redback bite was not published until 1927 - albeit describing
an event occurring 40 years earlier (Jackson, 1927: 525).
Yet envenomation is not simply a corollary of possessing fangs and a venom sac;
it requires an embodied performance. Part of the credulity over the danger posed
by Latrodectus - especially in Australia - was the spiders' reluctance to bite. They
would often curl up and sham death when threatened. When in 1901 the Curator
of Wellington's Colonial Museum allowed imported Australian redbacks to scurry
across his hand, they did not bite. However, he reported, mere contact produced
a local numbness he had similarly perceived when handling katipos (Anon, 1901).
A further cause for credulity was the small size of the species and the correspond-
ingly minute quantity of venom likely to be injected during a bite: 'if the
Latrodectus stories are true', sniffed one American entomologist in 1889, 'we have
a case in this creature of the most powerful poison known' (Anon, 1889: 347).
Both the geographical and anatomical location of bite sites also drew attention
to a key behavioural difference between katipos and redbacks. M¯ori held that the
katipo was a littoral species, dwelling in debris and foliage amid coastal sand dunes.
This geographic locus is confirmed by my sample of 123 M¯ori and P¯keh¯ bite
reports from colonial newspapers. The bodily distribution of bites also reflected
human beachside activities: many were sustained on the upper body by M¯ori who
slept in the dunes, while exposed hands and feet proved similarly hazardous for
P¯keh¯ beach-goers. Furthermore, bites on the upper arms, thighs or torso often
resulted after clothes were left on the sand and explored by wandering katipos.
Conversely, redbacks attracted particular opprobrium for the preponderance
of bites on colonists' buttocks - and especially on men's genitalia. The first
acknowledged redback bite, in 1863, prostrated a miner who, 'while sitting in a
water closet felt himself stung in the lower part of the scrotum'. After hours of
'great agony', profuse sweating and laboured breathing, his penis had become
'much enlarged, the prepuce œdematous containing a large quantity of white serous
fluid, the organ presenting the appearance in fact of one affected with virulent
gonorrhœa' (Carr, 1863: 87). Much as it later proved the stuff of comedy, until
well after the Australian colonies federated in 1901, the redback on the toilet seat
was a truism almost anywhere that outside 'dunnies' were erected. While this
peculiarity was shared with the American black widow ( Latrodectus mactans ), privies
were far from the only places redbacks colonised. Nevertheless, their predilection
for outhouses drew attention to the Australian species' fondness for sites of human
settlement, often far from coastal regions.
The third Latrodectus quality of note was their distinctive coloration. It seems
axiomatic that redback spiders should, indeed, sport a red mark on their backs. Yet
this was never simply a question of phenotype; it was also one of Providence. Arising
from seventeenth-century natural theology traditions, into the nineteenth century
the 'doctrine of signatures' held that 'the most noxious animals have evident marks
and characters, by which their dangerous properties are easily known' (Sturm, 1800:
90). Such biosemiotic shorthand had, for instance, already seen the Australian red-
bellied black snake ( Pseudechis porphyriacus ) ostracised. In more recent times, similar