Things that bite and sting are not such a problem for us Northern Hemispherers at this time of year but for those unlucky enough to be on the other side of the Equator its prime bitey, stingy time and an Australian man has just had his second brush with a spider who took exception to him urinating on his toilet bowl home and attacked the source.
For the second time, the man was turning up at his local hospital, pulling down his boxer shorts and asking his doctor to take a look.
While a stung penis sounds very painful, science has found out that while a throbbing todger may hurt, there are more painful places for a spider to stick its fangs.
Prof Adam Hart of the University of Gloucestershire said that fleshy parts of the body, where there's extra room to inject venom and greater capacity for swelling and areas with a lot of nerve endings are the most painful but one scientist, the stupid or brave Justin Schmidt, went above and beyond the call of duty and actually devised an experiment to establish which was the most painful part of the body to receive a sting - he inserted a bee's stinger into different parts of his own body and ranked the pain on a scale of one to 10.
The least painful locations, he found, were the upper arm, skull and tip of the middle toe while the worst were the nostril, the upper lip and the penis shaft.
While the Aussie with the rapidly swelling penis may have been uncomfortable, he was lucky the spider never made it to his nasal cavity but not as lucky as the doctor who had to treat him, lucky in that science has progressed enough that sucking the poison out of the site of the bite isn't the cure any longer.
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