We do not swallow any amount of spiders in a year, or likely in our entire lifetimes.
What sort of survival trait would drive a creature to crawl into the open mouths of other creatures?
There's a story behind this myth.
There was a young college student lady (in, I believe, the early 1990s) who wanted to do an experiment on how fast rumors and information spread in this new-ish Internet age we were entering. So she made up a list of 10 very distinct (and entirely false) "interesting facts" and emailed it to a few select people in various different groups within her college. After a time, she surveyed how many people had "heard of" these "facts", and based on that, put together a thesis on the speed and scope of spreading rumors.
HOWEVER, her experiment was more successful than she'd ever intended. Her list of "10 interesting facts" (the spider swallowing one being one of the most memorable) spread well beyond her local college email servers, and out into most of the English-speaking world!
A great many people now assume this is true, but it's just a very old... and vary false... rumor.
What sort of survival trait would drive a creature to crawl into the open mouths of other creatures?
There's a story behind this myth.
There was a young college student lady (in, I believe, the early 1990s) who wanted to do an experiment on how fast rumors and information spread in this new-ish Internet age we were entering. So she made up a list of 10 very distinct (and entirely false) "interesting facts" and emailed it to a few select people in various different groups within her college. After a time, she surveyed how many people had "heard of" these "facts", and based on that, put together a thesis on the speed and scope of spreading rumors.
HOWEVER, her experiment was more successful than she'd ever intended. Her list of "10 interesting facts" (the spider swallowing one being one of the most memorable) spread well beyond her local college email servers, and out into most of the English-speaking world!
A great many people now assume this is true, but it's just a very old... and vary false... rumor.