A 64-year-old Taiwanese woman, who had been struggling to sleep for several nights complaining of hearing unusual sounds in her left ear, was in shock when doctors discovered a small spider crawling inside her ear. It was when the woman visited a clinic nearby that the cause of the problem was diagnosed. Luckily, there was no damage to her eardrum.
The doctors used a tube to suction out the spider and its exoskeleton. “She didn’t feel pain because the spider was very small. It’s just about 2 to 3 millimeters,” Dr. Tengchin Wang, the director of the otolaryngology department at Tainan Municipal Hospital was quoted by NBC News.
Wang further said that though he had seen ants, moths, cockroaches, and mosquitoes inside people’s ears before, this case was a novelty since the insect was molted inside the woman’s ear canal. The doctors also published a case report detailing the woman’s experience in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A video of the same was also shared on X. “A woman with hypertension presented to the clinic with a 4-day history of abnormal sounds in her ear. On examination, a small spider was seen moving within the external auditory canal of the left ear. The molted exoskeleton of the spider was also present, ” the post caption read.
Jerry Rovner, an emeritus biology professor at Ohio University, proposed that the spider might have sought refuge inside the woman’s ear for protection and safety. ”Many hunting spiders (i.e., those that do not live in prey-capture webs) seek a sheltered location for the purpose of molting, as they cannot defend themselves from predators during that process,” he said.
Earlier this year, a woman experiencing tinnitus and ear pain was found to have a spider in her ear during an endoscopy. The doctor confirmed that the spider was not venomous, and the woman only endured minor damage to her ear canal.
