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Content Warning: Spiders!

arthwollipot

Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
arthwollipot
Joined
Feb 11, 2005
Messages
108,181
Location
Ngunnawal Country
This is a thread for discussing all things spidery, handily gathered into a single thread that arachnophobes can conveniently ignore.

Note that we are in SMMT, not in Entertainment, so real spiders only.

Here's a fun situation to kick it off:

Gippsland covered in webs as floods force spiders to fly, wallabies to swim

As their underground lairs are inundated, gossamer spiders are taking to the air to escape Gippsland's floodwaters.

In a process called "ballooning", the spiders throw fine webs into the wind, carrying them into the air to higher locations, often laying spectacular carpets of their webs over dryer ground.

Wellington Shire Councillor Carolyn Crossley, a "keen" birdwatcher, drove around the district to check for birds around the floodwaters.

"There was this stunning landscape that was shrouded in this silken web, gossamer web, spread across the landscape by the very busy spiders that were escaping the rising [water]," Cr Crossley said.

"It was a spectacular afternoon, the sun was shining, it was a magical experience."
Click to expand...
 
I had a girlfriend who was irrationally afraid of spiders. She even called me home from work to take care of a huge spider. Got home in a hurry, because she was really scared. Legs and all, it was maaaaybe the size of a quarter. Legs and all, so I just took it outside into the garden.
Anyhooo, one day she was heading to school, wearing a baseball cap. She kept itching her head. when she got to class she took off her hat and there was a smooched spider ��️ in it. I felt terrible for her but also found it hilarious
 
gabeygoat said:
I had a girlfriend who was irrationally afraid of spiders. She even called me home from work to take care of a huge spider. Got home in a hurry, because she was really scared. Legs and all, it was maaaaybe the size of a quarter. Legs and all, so I just took it outside into the garden.
Anyhooo, one day she was heading to school, wearing a baseball cap. She kept itching her head. when she got to class she took off her hat and there was a smooched spider ��️ in it. I felt terrible for her but also found it hilarious
Click to expand...

How did she know? Did it have lipstick on its face?
 
Yeah, I've seen your American quarters, and that's not a large spider. :)

Here's a photo I took... almost twenty years ago now. Wow I'm getting old.


Huntsman by Andrew Gould, on Flickr

Huntsmen are the famously big Australian spiders. If you hear someone talking about a huge spider in Australia, they're talking about a huntsman. Here's another one:


Lurking by Andrew Gould, on Flickr

This one gives you a bit of scale. The biggest huntsman spider I've seen was probably about seven inches across the legs. They're not dangerous. At all. I know one person who has been bitten by one, and it was because the spider had already had an argument with a cat, and they stepped on it with bare feet. All they got was an itchy spot.
 
arthwollipot said:
Yeah, I've seen your American quarters, and that's not a large spider. :)

Here's a photo I took... almost twenty years ago now. Wow I'm getting old.

[qimg]https://live.staticflickr.com/3296/3065747770_a0e55e8b66_c.jpg[/qimg]
Huntsman by Andrew Gould, on Flickr

Huntsmen are the famously big Australian spiders. If you hear someone talking about a huge spider in Australia, they're talking about a huntsman. Here's another one:

[qimg]https://live.staticflickr.com/3443/3350657736_8ee21ff3ab_c.jpg[/qimg]
Lurking by Andrew Gould, on Flickr

This one gives you a bit of scale. The biggest huntsman spider I've seen was probably about seven inches across the legs. They're not dangerous. At all. I know one person who has been bitten by one, and it was because the spider had already had an argument with a cat, and they stepped on it with bare feet. All they got was an itchy spot.
Click to expand...

Thanks to "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!", broadcast in the UK and filmed in Oz, we are very familiar with your huntsman spiders.
 
bluesjnr said:
Thanks to "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!", broadcast in the UK and filmed in Oz, we are very familiar with your huntsman spiders.
Click to expand...
Not as familiar as we are. :D

I once watched a very butch wasp dragging an equally butch, but paralysed, huntsman spider to its burrow under the house I lived in at the time. It was like watching a biology textbook in action.
 
lionking said:
The most amazing part of that story is the how wonderful evolution is. Natural selection resulting in ballooning webs? Fantastic.
Click to expand...
And spiders cooperating to survive. There's a BBC piece too.
Though perhaps cooperating spiders is something we need to think about?


Here in Dublin we're having some problems with False Widows; I ejected one from a bathroom on Tuesday and a couple of weeks ago a neighbour, with heart problems, was hospitalised after being bitten.
 
The funny thing is that there really aren't that many Australian spiders that are very dangerous to humans. There's the Sydney Funnel Web, which is nasty and aggressive, but no-one has died from its bite since the antivenom was developed in 1981. And there's the redback, but again they are responsible for very few deaths. White-tails have a reputation for causing necrosis, but this was demonstrated to be false in 2003. Necrosis was discovered to be largely caused by infection, not venom.

That's about it. There are some spiders that'll give you a nasty, but non-fatal, bite, but a spider is more likely to cause your death by dropping into your lap as you're barrelling down the highway at 100kph.
 
I sometimes used to post cool videos about spiders until I found that some people have a strong, visceral, negative reaction to them, I like I do with inoculation videos (very much of a problem nowadays.)

There was one where there was something that looked like a hairy ball. The cameraperson disturbed the mound, and hundreds or thousands of tiny spiders scattered. I believe it said that they were huddling together because of the cold.
 
alfaniner said:
I sometimes used to post cool videos about spiders until I found that some people have a strong, visceral, negative reaction to them, I like I do with inoculation videos (very much of a problem nowadays.)

There was one where there was something that looked like a hairy ball. The cameraperson disturbed the mound, and hundreds or thousands of tiny spiders scattered. I believe it said that they were huddling together because of the cold.
Click to expand...

Think that will have been baby spiders - the common garden spider lays a few hundred eggs that all hatch around the same time, the spiderlings stay huddled up for a little while. Touch them and they scatter only to come back together after a little time.
 
alfaniner said:
I sometimes used to post cool videos about spiders until I found that some people have a strong, visceral, negative reaction to them, I like I do with inoculation videos (very much of a problem nowadays.)
Click to expand...
Hence why I created this thread, with a clear content warning in the title, so that people who do have a strong negative reaction to them can avoid it.
 
Amazing fact a spider: has eight knees, or forty-eight knees, depending on how you look at it.

I have never minded spiders at all. Even when I saw a huge hairy tarantula high up on the wall of a plantation house I was staying at in Trinidad. What gives me the creeps are things that fly, like moths, flies, bats or even birds if they flap their wings too close to me (I love birds otherwise). Ugh, makes me shudder all over. Likewise snakes. I cannot even look at them.

If I saw a spider in the bath I used to help it out by giving it a small ladder to climb up usually a long piece of toilet paper, then let it scuttle off on the floor.
 
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arthwollipot said:
That's about it. There are some spiders that'll give you a nasty, but non-fatal, bite, but a spider is more likely to cause your death by dropping into your lap as you're barrelling down the highway at 100kph.
Click to expand...

Does that happen often? I'm not sure I want to go to Australia.
 
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Ziggurat said:
Does that happen often? I'm not sure I want to go to Australia.
Click to expand...

It's common enough that I've seen it twice.

Huntsmen like to hide in shallow flat places, like under the bark of a tree.

The space behind the sun-visor in a car, is exactly the kind of place that they like to hide.

For my experiences:

1. Driving along Parramatta Rd in rush hour, my passenger put down the sun-visor.
Plop! A big hairy huntsman in his lap. (Hilarity ensues as the pair of us "big manly-men", fresh from the building site, argued on the side of the road, as to which one of us was going to get the spider out of the car)

2. Driving across the Hay plain, same experience, except, that time I was alone, and the spider was behind my sun-visor. The physical sensation of the spider landing in my lap was disgusting!

Fortunately it scrambled into my hand easily, and I was able to send it out the window.


I am immensely proud of the fact that I didn't crash the car on either occasion!

Note that huntsmen do a threat display when disturbed which is quite disconcerting and adds to the whole "surprise!" effect.
 
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