Spider video sparks international debate

JOHANNESBURG SOUTH – The viral “Spider bursts out of banana” video has made waves online after its initial posting in mid-June. The video is currently number 16 on the most popular Youtube videos being viewed in South Africa. The authenticity of the video has been questioned, with commentators asking why someone would start filming a banana as soon as the spider began its exit.

The person who uploaded the video, Kaleb Lechowski, describes himself as a “passionate computer animation artist”, which tipped amateur detectives off that the video may have been a technical exercise for the CGI animation artist. On Lechowski’s Tumbler page he states: “I create and animate creatures of different kinds.”

The likelihood of a spider living inside a banana is also extremely small. In an interview done by National Geographic in November 2014, arachnologist Rick Vetter stated that finding spiders in banana bunches was relatively uncommon. He estimated that the highest number of incidents found in one year, in the United States, was 15. Vetter has been researching cases of spiders being found in fruit shipments since 2006.

Linda Rayor, a spider expert, stated in an interview with Scientific American: “There are two common groups that are both referred to as “banana spiders,” but they’re totally different from one another. The first group is the wandering spiders, which is the family Ctenidae, or ctenids. The other is an entirely different family, the Sparassidae, which are the huntsman spiders. They’re both big spiders that have relatively long legs. They can both easily be the size of the palm of your hand, no problem.”

Instances of spiders stowing away in bananas have occurred and been well publicized internationally. However, these cases usually involve a spider lurking within a bunch of bananas or laying eggs on the surface of the skin of the fruit.