A spider was extracted from British singer Katie Melua's ear after it took up residence there for an entire week, reports The Guardian.

Melua documented her arachnid close encounter on her Instagram account, complete with pictures.

The singer said she had been bothered by an occasional rustling sound in her ear and visited the doctor. The physician discovered the tiny spider -- alive -- in her ear and used a micro-vacuum cleaner to remove it. The spider, identified as a member of the Salticidae, or jumping spider, family, allegedly found its way into Melua's ear through a pair of earbud headphones.

"Basically I used these old in-ear monitors to block out sound on a flight. A little spider must have been in them and crawled inside my ear and stayed there for the week," the 30-year-old Georgian-British singer wrote on Instagram.


"Though the thing looked TERRIFYING up-close on the doctor's camera, once he took him out it was pretty small, and now it's in this little test tube, alive and seemingly fine," she captioned a picture of the spider in a plastic container.

A spokeswoman for Melua told the Daily Mail that the ear specialist had never removed a live bug before, but rather "plenty of dead ones."

"When it was out it was pretty tiny," the spokeswoman explained. "Katie kept it in the test tube and released it in her garden when she got home. Apart from shuffling and random noises in her ear, the spider was no bother for the entire week it lived there. She was relieved it was what it was as she was worried she was losing her hearing."

Melua, 30, is best known for hits such as "Nine Million Bicycles" and "The Closest Thing to Crazy." She also wrote and recorded a song called "Spider's Web," though it was not about spiders.