A Chip Off the Old Web: The Pringle Spider

In 2022, Pringles discovered what every corporation dreams of: a billboard that reproduces on its own. It was green, roughly the size of a fingernail, and had eight legs.

• 

• 

The kidney garden spider is a small orb-weaver found across parts of Asia. At first glance, there is nothing particularly snack-food-related about it. But on its abdomen, against a pale patch, sit two dark dots, a curved black marking, and what looks remarkably like a tiny mustache. Put it next to the Pringles logo and the resemblance is bizarrely convincing. Pringles noticed too, and instead of simply posting a picture online and moving on, the company decided to make the resemblance official.

In June 2022, Pringles launched a campaign to have the kidney garden spider recognized as the “Pringles Spider.” What could have been a one-day social media joke quickly became something much more elaborate. The company created a website, released promotional videos, and even allowed people to virtually “adopt” a Pringles Spider. Most importantly, it launched a Change.org petition directed at arachnology organizations around the world. The goal was to convince at least one professional group to publicly recognize the nickname.

Thousands of people joined in. The petition eventually collected 7,741 verified signatures, meaning thousands of people willingly added their names to a campaign asking professional spider scientists to acknowledge that a tiny orb-weaver looked like a potato-chip mascot. Pringles even raised the stakes: according to the promotion’s rules, if one approved arachnology organization used the name “Pringles Spider” by October 31, 2022, the first 1,500 eligible petition signers would receive a coupon for a free can of Pringles.

For a brief time, access to free potato chips depended on the decisions of the international arachnology community.

The campaign was ridiculous, but it was also surprisingly serious about what counted as success. An organization could qualify by using the name in a press release, article, social-media post, memo, or website update. Pringles was not literally trying to replace the spider’s scientific name, but it was trying to push “Pringles Spider” into common usage. In other words, the company was attempting to give nature a brand name.

There was one problem: while Pringles was campaigning over what the spider should be called, scientists had already changed its name.

For years, the species had been known scientifically as Araneus mitificus. But in 2021, researchers placed it into a newly established genus, Bijoaraneus, making its accepted scientific name Bijoaraneus mitificus. Pringles’ campaign, launched the following year, continued to use the older name. It is a small detail, but also a very funny one: a multinational company launched an international campaign centered around the naming of a spider and was already behind on the spider’s actual taxonomy.

Despite the thousands of signatures and all the publicity, the scientific community never appears to have embraced the Pringles Spider as an official common name. Today, the World Spider Catalog still lists the species as Bijoaraneus mitificus, while the old petition remains online as evidence of the time people tried to pressure arachnologists into helping them win free chips.

But there is an even better twist to the story. The spider did not suddenly evolve a Pringles mustache in 2022. The species was first scientifically described in 1886, decades before Pringles existed. Long before anyone stacked curved potato crisps into a cardboard tube, these spiders were already wandering around Asia with tiny black mustaches printed on their abdomens.

Which means Pringles may have spent its entire campaign asking the wrong question. Maybe the mystery is not why this spider looks so much like the Pringles logo.

Maybe it is why the Pringles logo looks so much like this spider.