Yesterday morning, thanks to Matthew, I pointed out that the Guardian had screwed up one of its biology stories, the one noted in this headline:
What apparently had happened is that somebody at a news service (see below) googled “crab spider” instead of “spider crab”, and concluded that spider crabs were venomous. Then the Guardian simply cut and pasted the false assertions about the spider crab—no crabs are venomous though some are toxic to eat—to create a clickbait story.
Pity, pity, because since the crabs aren’t venomous, the story loses a lot of its click-y allure. A number of people pointed out to the Guardian that this story wasn’t exactly true (the swarming part was). Matthew also informed one of his friends who works at the Guardian (see below). Regardless, the complaints worked, and now there’s a new story sans venomous crabs. Click below to see the latest story, lacking the word “venomous”.
And kudos to the Guardian for noting that they changed the story. At the bottom of the new page you can read this:
This article was amended on 8 August 2022. An earlier version incorrectly stated in the headline and text that the spider crabs massing at Cornish beaches were “venomous”; no species of crab is venomous. Also, their Latin species name is Maja brachydactyla, not “Hyas araneus” as we said.
Someone else must have corrected the species name. I took the paper at its word, for Hyas araneus is the “great spider crab”. Now we learn that these un-venomous crabs are actually Maja brachydactyla, in a completely different family. Now how did they screw that one up? By copying from another source?
Well, all’s well that ends well, except, perhaps, for the would-be bathers who avoided the waters off Cornwall.
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Here’s Matthew’s email to the Guardian:
From: Matthew Cobb
Subject: Crab spiders
Date: 7 August 2022 at 22:11:22 BST
To: “guardian.letters@guardian.co.uk” <guardian.letters@guardian.co.uk>
Over the weekend The Guardian website followed the rest of the UK press by printing a story about ‘venomous spider crabs’ moving into shallow waters off Cornwall to moult [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/06/spider-crabs-swarm-in-shallow-waters-on-cornish-beach].
Virtually all of these stories – including that in the Guardian – claimed the crabs ‘have a venomous bite that is poisonous to their prey but harmless to humans’.
This is not true. No crab is venomous. Indeed, out of over 7.000 species of crustacean, only one is known to be venomous, and it is not a crab.
This error – which the Guardian has still not uncorrected, despite repeated alerts on social media – appears to have originated in some journalist googling ‘spider crab’ and not noticing that the pages they got back referred to ‘crab spider’. It was then simply copied by other journalists, including your own.
It is hard to know which is more disheartening: the original error, or your thoughtless repeating of it. This example does not particularly matter, but confidence in the press is a fragile thing.
Matthew Cobb
All climate change stories are researched this well. Did you hear about the climate change lightning in DC?
I hadn’t, until you mentioned it, so I looked it up.
What I found was several sources reporting the recent deadly lightning strike in DC, then pointing out that the frequency of lightning strikes is predicted to increase due to anthropogenic climate change (a 2014 study published in Science is cited), then mentioning data (DATA) suggesting that lightning frequency is, in fact, increasing. Finally, they emphasize that fatal lightning strikes will still be exceedingly rare even if frequency increases.
Nobody claimed that climate change caused that specific lightning strike.
Please specify the aspects of that reporting that you feel represent shoddy research on the same plane as confusing spider crabs with crab spiders.
I think our friend Dr.B is more interested in making a culture war point than an actual point of fact.
He does that occasionally I’ve noticed. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
He certainly does, thereby often distorting, misrepresenting and/or misunderstanding the issues he comments on. Perfect example: “All climate change stories are researched this well.” Dead wrong, and a dead give away for a climate change denier, persons woefully misled by a huge, and rather successful, misinformation campaign and/or willful ignorance. A very dangerous social/cultural phenomenon.
This is simply what news media are supposed to do when they make errors. But good for them for correcting and noting the correction.
Bravo!
Good for the Guardian, they posted a nonsense story (the ‘venomenousness’, not the swarming) , but corrected it and owned their mistake. Kudos to the Guardian there (yes, of course it would have been better to have checked with a biologist before publishing, but still). I wish more papers would do that, correcting their mistakes.
It is the silly season!
It would be more fun if crab spiders were swarming Cornish beaches, though. Probably not great for the spiders, though, so it’s just as well not.
Not good enough as other news outlets & papers picked up on the ‘venomous crabs’ & now the story will never die! This is what you get when you employ idiots in news agencies who have poor general knowledge & rely on ‘Google’ without knowing how to do a proper search.
In fact I am not sure the Guardian was first –
https://www.ecosia.org/search?method=index&q=venemous%20crabs
Looks like the Mirror on the 5th as well as Metro, the Independent etc.
This is why librarians are so important – we can teach people the search & discrimination skills that so-called digital natives do not have!!!
Here in Canada the CBC web site has a “Corrections and clarifications” link. It also provides a handy “Report error” form to notify the news department of … errors.
As Matthew notes, “This is not true. No crab is venomous. Indeed, out of over 7.000 species of crustacean, only one is known to be venomous, and it is not a crab.”
But that leaves me (well, my more intelligent wife who I just regaled with this post) wondering, what is that one venomous crustacean species?
Remipedes. More than one species.
Lazy journalists and publishers rely more and more on news agency prepared news. This is an abdication of quality. Journalists from agencies are usually low-quality interns.
A quick google tells me that the story appeared in The Independent (paywalled, so I can’t see if they corrected it), Sky News (uncorrected but they do have an ironic link saying “why you can trust Sky News”), The Metro (uncorrected), The Daily Mirror (uncorrected, but derisory comments visible), The Daily Express (uncorrected), The Sun (uncorrected). The Daily Fail has the story but they’ve deleted any mention of the venom or the shark attack. I have new respect for the Mail.
Given the above, I wonder why we are focussing our opprobrium on one of the few British media outlets that corrected the story.
A beautiful unintentional double negative.
Sorry for the second reply but I’ve just noticed this:
That explains why all of the web sites I cited above had identical text. They all published the story from the “news agency based in south-west England” verbatim without checking the facts, except The Daily Mail.