Artistic License – Arachnids

Six legs, antennae, clearly that's an insect, not a spider.

Not unlike their insect brethren, it's fairly common for scorpions, spiders, and other arachnids to be depicted less-than-accurately within the world of fiction.

Common errors include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Arachnids don't have jaws, teeth, or tongues like vertebrates do. Spider fangs always point downwards, not directly inwards towards each other like insect mandibles (though araneomorph fangs do point diagonally down and inwards). They also aren't used to suck the juices from prey (ie, they're not tiny vampires); instead they have a tiny mouth-hole, which is what regurgitates enzymes to digest the food and does the sucking afterwards, often using also the fangs to grind the prey as in orb web spiders and tarantulas.
• An arachnid's limbs are attached to the first of their two body segments (the prosoma) and aren't configured or proportioned like those of vertebrates. Additionally, the legs of arachnids always end in a tarsus (equivalent to the toes on vertebrates), which usually sports two very hard to see claws, as opposed to tapering to a point as often seen in fiction.
• Scorpions, spiders and most other arachnids have eight legs (the pincers are pedipalps, which are closer to mouthparts than anything), but good luck finding a fictional one with the right number of legs. This is made all the more jarring because a simple Google search would clear up this misunderstanding immediately. Mites are more variable: most have eight legs as adults and nymphs but just six legs as larvae, and the unusual family Eriophyidae have just four legs.
• Spiders have their egg-laying hole near the front of the abdomen and wrap their eggs in a ball of silk for protection, being unable to implant their eggs inside anything, a far cry from the parasitoid reproduction seen in some fictional spiders.
• Almost every single spider in fiction will be associated with web-making and silk production. Not all spiders produce webs to hunt, with some preferring to stalk or chase after prey using silk to protect their eggs and often to build their burrows. Even those that do make silk/webs exhibit more variety in web-shapes than the net-like orb-weaver-style net most often seen in fiction, with some like those of the notorious black widow spider looking more like tangles of silken threads without a distinct pattern. A few spiders even hunt from burrows lined with silk that acts as tripwires, although they're rarer.
• Spiders normally have eight eyes and rarely have less than this number, but they're commonly depicted in fiction as having only two, four, or six.
• The Solifugae, an arachnid order distinct from true spiders and scorpions, are often incorrectly lumped with either order, leading to their common names "camel spiders," "sun spiders," and "wind scorpions". They're also frequently described as extremely venomous and aggressive to humans, both of which are false. See Creepy Camel Spider for more about them.
• The Opiliones, or harvestmen, are another separate arachnid order frequently mistaken for spiders because they look superficially similar. Adding to the confusion, they're also commonly known as "daddy long-legs," a nickname they share with a family of actual spiders, the Pholcidae or cellar spiders. The simplest way to distinguish them is that spiders have a constriction between their two major body segments, making their prosoma and opisthosoma visually distinct, while harvestmen have those segments broadly connected so their whole body appears to be a single oval.
  • Related to the above, there's an oft-repeated myth that daddy long-legs have the most potent venom of any creature on Earth, but they're actually harmless to humans because their fangs are too small to penetrate our skin. Both harvestmen and the aforementioned Pholcid spiders get hit with this myth. In reality, the harvestmen completely lack venom glands, and their mouthparts are more like claws than biting fangs. While Pholcid spiders are able to bite and envenomate a human, their venom is only a mild irritant to most people.
  • A similar commonly stated myth states that a tarantula's bite is "no more painful than a bee sting". While it is generally true that tarantula bites are not dangerous to humans, they are still extremely painful, especially in the larger species due to the sheer size of the fangs.
• Due to factors including arachnid respiratory systems, exoskeleton limitations, and body temperature regulatory systems, it's simply not possible for arachnids to reach the sizes often depicted — they'd either collapse under their own weight or suffocate.
• Spiders are consistently depicted as being lethally venomous, the venom is almost always of the "causes heart attack" type (with an occasional appearance of the "paralyzes whole body, including lungs" type), and their venom always acts within seconds, regardless of species or other factors like the bitten human's health. Most spiders aren't even dangerous to humans at all. Even with ones that are, such as the brown recluse, the venom may take anywhere from a few hours to almost a day before the effects are felt. Even on the spider’s natural prey, insects, the venom still can take up to a few minutes to actually kill it^note Not just effects vary depending of the spider species considered, but also depends of what kind of prey is envenomated. In web-weaving spiders, as the black widow, that wrap their prey in silk, venom tends to be more to paralyze it than for killing it outright.
• While in Real Life some tarantulas and various trapdoor spiders can indeed hiss by rubbing their fangs together, most spiders can't and don't.
• Because of both Small Taxonomy Pools and Rule of Scary, a big arachnid that's not very dangerous in real life (such as a tarantula or an emperor scorpion) will be treated as if it is highly dangerous, making it a rough equivalent of the Terrifying Pet Store Rat. Tarantulas, and the biggest species of scorpions, usually have venom that will have little effect on something as big as a human, even if their bites and stings are often painful. The most venomous spiders and scorpions are typically quite small. The big ones are chosen because the little ones won't show up well on a movie screen and because if an animal with weak venom did end up biting anyone on the cast or crew, it would be less of a problem than if an animal with strong venom bit them.

A Sub-Trope of the above-mentioned Somewhere, an Entomologist Is Crying. A Super-Trope to You Have to Burn the Web, Projectile Webbing, Cobweb Trampoline, Creepy Camel Spider, and Fuzzball Spider. Related to Artistic License – Ornithology, Artistic License – Paleontology, Artistic License – Marine Biology, Somewhere, a Herpetologist Is Crying and Somewhere, a Mammalogist Is Crying.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Arachnid: Alice jumps all over the place when analogies to real-life arachnids are made. One chapter she's an araneid (orb-weaver spider), the next she's a salticid (jumping spider).

Comic Books

• Grendel: The comic likes to depict black widow spiders sinisterly sitting in the center of their orb webs, but real-life black widows are cobweb weavers.
• Spider-Man: Spiders don't have most of the traits that the eponymous hero does. They're not particularly strong for their size in the same way Spider-Man is and they certainly don't have a quasi-mystical spider-sense that can predict all kinds of danger before they even have signs to happen^note Spiders can indeed detect subtle environmental shifts and vibrations through their hairs to avoid predators and locate prey, but not to the almost precognitive level Spider-Man is sometimes portrayed with. What they do have are webs, reflexes, venom, and being extremely hardy. The Wallcrawler only has the hardiness and the reflexes naturally. And wallcrawling, of course. Furthermore, Spider-Man's origin story in "Amazing Fantasy #15" has the narrator incorrectly refer to the radioactive spider that bit Peter as an insect, when in fact they are arachnids.

Eastern European Animation

• Vízipók-Csodapók: The water spider protagonist and diadem spider deuteragonist are both depicted with two arms and four legs (a total of only six limbs, instead of the appropriate eight).

Fan Works

• The Discworld continuum of A.A. Pessimal expands on the marginal canon character of Arachne, a spider-obsessed graduate of the Assassins' Guild who uses arachnids as an agent for creative and stylish inhumation. The Pessimal Discworld has Arachne Webber as a senior student at the Guild School, who (where other students are allowed to keep a brace of stylish hunting dogs as pets) elects to have a companion spider. In her case, the Sloth-Eating Spider of Paraquat, which she has neglected to inform Guild authorities grows to a mature size of nine feet across from claw-tip to claw-tip and is perfectly capable of stunning and eating a large hunting dog. She names this pet Felicia. In Real Life, of course, for a spider to grow to this size would be biologically impossible due to the Square-Cube Law.
• The Spiderses: Twilight's spider eggs are described as being in a large pile, growing larger over time, and being translucent. Most house spiders contain their eggs in opaque sacs where observing changes is impossible until the spiderlings hatch.

Films — Animation

• Charlotte's Web: Despite clearly being a spider, Charlotte has insect-like antennae. She also only has two eyes and her mouth is distinctly vertebral.
• Inuyasha the Movie: Affections Touching Across Time features a monstrous gigantic scorpion that not only has jaws, but also another head hidden in his stinger tail. Then again, it's a youkai.

Films — Live-Action

• Arachnophobia:
  • The super-spider species the film uses as an Animal Nemesis is yet another example of spiders having Perfect Poison, turning a single bite from any of them, be it baby or full grown, into a certified death sentence.
  • Spiders do not have the same physical or social arrangement as ants and bees (that being drones, queens, and the like).
  • The spiders are constantly being handled rough, falling from very high places such as trees, and being all right. In reality, they would be seriously hurt or even killed by that.
• Dr. No: First, Dr. No's henchman Professor R.J. Dent tried to kill James Bond by putting a very large tarantula in his bed while he slept. Even if it bit him (it didn't), it probably would've just hurt a lot. Later, Honey Ryder tells Bond that she killed her landlord after he raped her by putting a female black widow on his bed, and that it took the guy a week to die. She got very lucky: contrary to urban legend, black widow bites are rarely fatal to humans (they do hurt like hell, though, and can make humans very sick).
• Eight Legged Freaks: Spiders can't talk or practice kung fu, only a few species are actually capable of hissing, and different species never work together.
• Kingdom of the Spiders: A swarm of super-aggressive tarantulas with extra-potent venom is blamed on...the spiders' food supply being eliminated by human encroachment. So, the lack of food made the spiders multiply explosively, change their behavioral patterns (attacking humans and livestock, encasing prey in webbing), and gave them super-potent venom? Not even a "mutation caused by toxic waste or nuclear testing" handwave. Even if there were such an excuse given, the whole thing is laughably unrealistic.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Shelob is, for all intents and purposes, a giant funnelweb spider living high in the mountains above Minas Morgul and fairly faithful to her characterization from Tolkien's legendarium, with the dozens of webbed up corpses implying that film Shelob retained the endless hunger from her book counterpart. Shelob has a venomous stinger (which spiders don't have, as their venom is injected through their fangs, while stingers only evolved through flying insects such as wasps, or other arachnids such as scorpions), which she stabs Frodo with to paralyze him (he gets better) and tries to do several times to Sam. See below in Literature.

Literature

• Artemis Fowl: A spider is sometimes fed to people so that it will kill them from the inside out, but it can be killed with coffee because the caffeine drives it into heart attacks. Like other invertebrates, spiders and other arachnids are actually much less affected by caffeine than mammals are: their circulatory systems are completely different.
• The Saga of Darren Shan is about a spider-obsessed boy who becomes a vampire due to a misadventure involving a giant blue and red "poisonous" (not "venomous") spider who performs in a circus with the vampire who bloods Darren. Of course, the spider-tamer vampire's show-stopping trick involves the spider spinning a web over his mouth. Spiders appear throughout the series, and, fitting the series' reputation as "the Darker and Edgier Harry Potter" Darren can talk to them the way Harry talks to snakes.
• Legend of the Shadow Warriors: At one point, adventurers can come across Smegg the goblin, who is wearing a skinned spider as a pelt. Arachnids don't have "fur" or any external skin structure.
• The Lord of the Rings: The above-mentioned Shelob has a stinger in the original book as well, alongside horns and a beak and clusters of eyes. Justified, as in Shelob is less than a "spider blown to humongous size" and more of the literal daughter of an Animalistic Abomination in a spider-like shape, namely Ungoliant, described in The Silmarillion.

Live-Action TV

• CSI: One episode had a victim who was killed with Brazilian wandering spider venom and a suspect who owned a Brazilian wandering spider. The "Brazilian wandering spider" that was shown was a small black tarantula, while the real thing is gray and larger than some people's hands. The real thing is also deadly venomous and quite aggressive, so using a stand-in spider makes sense both for safety reasons and most people not being able to tell the difference anyway.
• Mythbusters: In the 2004 season episode "Buried in Concrete," Adam and Jamie test the myth that Pholcid spiders (daddy long-legs) have the most potent venom of any spider but are harmless to humans because their fangs can't pierce skin. They bring up a previous experiment, where scientists injected mice with Pholcid venom or black widow venom; the mice injected with black widow venom had much stronger reactions. Then, Adam deliberately gets himself bit by inserting his hand into a container with several Pholcid spiders and only feels a mild, short-lived burning sensation as a result.

Music

• Alice Cooper: The Black Widow describes the titular spider as "he" and "unholiest of kings," when in reality it's the females that are dangerous. Also, black widows, like all spiders, don't sting— they bite.
  The evil of his sting
  The horror that he brings,
  Unholiest of kings -
  The Black Widow!^note as Alice isn't singing about an actual spider, this trope does not apply

Tabletop Games

• Rifts: All three versions of the Coalition States' Spider-Skull Walker have only six legs instead of the proper eight. A Running Gag for them is an editor's note appearing right after said description which states "Yes, we know spiders have eight legs." One type is built to look like a scorpion, and it has six legs, plus the pincers, suggesting that the designers were aware that a scorpion's pincers aren't really limbs at all.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: Traptrix Atrax's pet/true form (it's somewhat ambiguous which it is) is a giant spider using a standard orb weaver web...except that she's named for a genus of the Australian Funnel-Web Spider, a trapdoor spider that doesn't use a trapdoor on its burrow, instead favoring a system of triplines around its hole. It's not a translation issue either, as its Japanese name is "Atra no Kowakuma," referring to either the same genus or the larger Atracinae subfamily it belongs to.

Toys

• BIONICLE: The spider-esque Visorak swarm (barring a few types of Kahgaraks) and Fenrakk have only four legs, and some of the before-mentioned Kahgaraks (as well as Fenrakk Spawn Spiders) only have six legs. Strangely justified in-universe, because they were made that way by their creators the Brotherhood of Makuta.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: Tarantulas and scorpions are two of the 3 bugs in the games that are extremely hostile towards the player and were the only bugs until New Horizons that could make the player pass out upon stinging/biting them. If the player has a net equipped, they will chase after the player until they get stung, enter a building, or quit and reload the game, unlike their real-life counterparts, which aren't capable of doing that.
• Bendy and the Ink Machine: The spider Edgar seems to have four legs on the "Butcher Gang" poster (though a third pair of his legs might have been obscured by Charly and poster damage) and six legs in the actual cartoons, if the character doodles made by Time-the-Hobo (who is the official 2D animator/cartoonist for the game) are to be believed. Striker, the Mook based on an anthropomorphic version of Edgar, has two legs and four arms, though his left arms have been mangled and mechanically fused into one, allowing for him to attack Henry with a Megaton Punch.
• Doom: The Spider Mastermind and her Arachnotrons (not seen until Doom II and onward) all have two vestigial arms and four mechanical legs. Granted, they're just demons with "spider" in their name. Doom 64 gives them another pair of mechanical legs while removing their vestigial arms.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The so-called frostbite spiders are very clearly actually giant solifugids. While this in and of itself isn't necessarily a problem - many solifugids have "spider" in their names - the fact that they still seem to spin webs and secrete venom is puzzling.
• EverQuest II features spiders and some scorpions all over the world of Norrath. For convenience sake so the player can easily target them, the majority of them are no less than the size of a mid-sized dog. Many of them can inflict poison damage, and only very few of them actually rely on using webbing to slow the player's attacks. One notable example exists in the region of the Sinking Sands: the Terrorantula, a legendary monster who has existed for centuries that very few adventurers have ever seen to confirm its existence. It's a gigantic tarantula roughly the size of a 3 story house. Not only does its existence violate the Square-Cube Law, but it has an exceptionally potent venom that acts faster than most smaller spiders.
• Fallout: A character notes that the giant scorpions should have their venom greatly diluted, but he is puzzled as to why it seems to remain just as potent.
• Guild Wars 2: The Canyon Spiders aren't spiders at all and appear to be giant solifugids instead.
• Limbo (2010): The Giant Spider has only four legs.
• Nightmare Creatures: One of the many monsters you fight in the game are giant spiders, which turned entire streets in London into their nests. However, these spiders only have six limbs (four of which are used for attacking) and can walk upright on their two hind legs in a humanoid manner and have reptilian-looking heads. Might be justified because the spiders, like all the other titular creatures, are lab-produced mutants. The sequel's design gets slighty better, giving them smaller, hunched bodies with leaner limbs tipped with claws. They still retain an ogreish humanoid head.
• Pokémon:
  • There are eight Pokémon based on spiders. Spinarak, Dewpider, and Araquanid only have six legs each, and Ariados (Spinarak's evolution), Joltik, and Galvantula have only four. Tarountula and Spidops make up the first and only evolution line of spider Pokémon to avert this trope, with both having eight legs.
  • Skorupi and Drapion, both based on scorpions, each have half the amount of legs they should. However, in an aversion of another frequent scorpion trope, their pincers are attached to their heads, just like those of real scorpions.
• Both Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 featured spider enemies with four legs. Interestingly enough, one boss from the first game, Tarantox, has six legs.
• Watch_Dogs: There's a diversion/activity taking place in a fantastic, drug-fueled alternate reality where you can control a Spider Tank. The thing actually looked like a rather convincing spider, except with the glaring flaw of having only six legs...
• Warcraft III:
  • There are spiders bigger than horses who release their two young, smaller (man-sized) spiders at death.
  • The Nerubians are a race of spider-men with six limbs.
• World of Illusion: The spiders in the game have six legs instead of eight, for starters.

Web Animation

• Challenge to Win: Basically every spider character, including Yellow Spider, has only four legs.
• Object Terror: El Nudelo Spider has but four legs.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: Ocho the spider has only six legs, though it's justified because he's 8-bit, making it easier to animate him with less legs.
• The Angry Beavers: One episode referred to daddy longlegs as insects, but they're really arachnids. Note that in the UK, however, daddy longlegs is a nickname for the Cranefly. The arachnid called daddy longlegs in the US is known as a Harvestman in the UK (yes, it's confusing).
• Futurama: Lampshaded in the TV film "Bender's Game," where the Professor gets angry at Igner for calling a giant spider a "magic bug."
• Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law: In the episode "Turner Classic Birdman," a Reducto-shrunk Birdman contends with "a spider...with only six legs!" When he gets a call from Falcon 7 that Vulturo has stolen a hydrogen bomb and feebly insists he has to deal with this emergency first, Falcon 7 isn't sympathetic. "Let's see, hydrogen bomb...gimp spider. Hydrogen bomb or gimp spider, ooooooh...."
• Mickey Mouse:
  • The Mad Doctor: One scene involves Mickey running into a skeletal spider. In real life, spiders (like all arthropods) have exoskeletons in place of bones. Then again, the whole thing was All Just a Dream.
  • The Worm Turns: A six-legged spider is attacked by a four-legged test subject fly.
• The Mask had the episode "Sister Mask" where the Big Bad of the series, Dr. Pretorius, a Cyborg turned into a Giant Spider as a Superpowered Evil Side upon wearing Loki's mask - or more accurately, he became a stylized version of his own head, mounted on six vaguely crab-like legs.
• Primal (2019): The fourth episode has a Giant Spider that can spit silk from its mouth, among other inaccuracies.
• The Secret Saturdays: Munya is supposed to transform into a spider/human hybrid, but looks much more like a red Hulk with fangs, claws, and four spider legs poking out of his back.
  • However, there is a bit of Fridge Brilliance, when one acknowledges the arguments often used against the existence of giant spiders. He wouldn't be able to function if he had a more spider-like frame, so his design instead focuses on the spider's main strengths.
• Spider-Man (1967): The spider Chest Insignia on the eponymous hero's costume has only six legs, when actual spiders have eight legs.
• WordWorld: Spider not only has a mere six legs but also insectoid antennae.

Other

• There are recurring Urban Legends about winged spiders, generally said to be native to some "obscure" (read: fictitious) part of the Middle East, Central Asia or Australia. One that gained a lot of traction in the UK and the Republic of Ireland in 2014 claimed a winged spider with the scientific name Volat araneus was migrating to the British Isles due to rising temperatures in its native Kamistan and the abundant population of its natural prey, the false widow This particular rumor came from a self-admitted hoax article that had snippets taken out of context; in real life, no spiders are known to have wings, although gliding spiders were discovered in Panama in 2015.

---