• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Dangerous Spiders ?

Nobody

New Blood
N
Joined
Sep 3, 2005
Messages
19
I am not generally scared of normal spiders ie the kind that live in north western Europe but I can't stand the giant poisonous Australian things.

Today I found a spider in my house that I think was too large and hideous to be a British species. It's body was about 1cm in diameter, it had legs just over an inch long and was a brown suede colour and hairy. It had large black fangs and eyes.

The thing is a relation of mine who also lives in my house was in the merchant navy up until 2 years ago and has travelled just about everywhere in the world. Would it be possible that a spider or two from say Australia or Mexico managed to get into his luggage and escaped into a warm cupboard in my house where it is protected from the British winters ?

I managed to trap the spider and flush it down the toilet after spending half an hour spraying it with Fly Killer which just seemed to annoy it and certainly didn't kill it or appear to harm it.

Once before I found an even larger spider in my house which I crushed.

Comments ?
 
More than possible.

I live on the US East Coast, near a state park. I routinly find spiders as big as my palm in the house. (And, yes, I shriek at the top of my lungs and get Mr.Blue to corral and then exile the monster to the outside.)
 
I'm usually too busy screaming and climbing onto a table top to remember the camera....:D
 
Raft spider? Common in East Anglia. They get pretty big. Biggest I ever saw was about the size you describe. Took me an hour to pluck up the courage to herd the monster into a glass and prepare to sling it out the window.

The GF wandered in, took it out the box, examined it , made some comment about wooses and placed it gently outside on the windowsill.

I think the giant poisonous Australian things are Koalas.

By the way- spiders have book lungs and a totally different blood system from insects. They are about as closely related to insects as you are to a dog. The only insect killer that works on them is a rolled up newspaper. Anything else just gets them angry, so they run up your arm and bite your head off.

Some day, I'll tell you about Camel Spiders, just to ruin your whole month.
 
Last edited:
Could be a common House spider or Wolf spider. Both are common in the UK, and are brown with bodies up to 1cm long.

Of the House Spider, the ARKive article says:
The house spider is probably the best known and perhaps the most hated of the British spiders, and is often encountered trapped in the bath. It is fairly large and hairy, has long legs and varies in colour from pale to dark brown.
Click to expand...
More:

http://www.kendall-bioresearch.co.uk/spider.htm
 
We occationally get these
pretties in the basement. They're either wolf spiders or "giant house spiders".


They're highly dangerous if you panic and slam into a doorframe, otherwise you're pretty safe.

We call them "teacup" spiders. :)
 
Last edited:
The monsters in our house are wolf spiders.

And after looking at the pictures, I have the heebie-jeebies.
 
My mother got bitten by a brown recluse spider when we lived in Texas. They are real small and have a small violin shaped mark on them. They are the second most poisenous spider in the US and are more common than the Black Widow. She had to have a whole cut in her leg where the doctors pulled out dead tissue. The process was repeated. It sucked. I hate spiders but wow are they amazing!
 
A spider with a body of 1 centimetre and legs of 1 inch must be from a species endemic to the UK: the Partially Metricated Spider.
 
I had a large spider appear in the car while I was driving yesterday. My reaction was to bat it away, which I did, but then I lost track of it, which made it absolutely worse.

A leaf blew in the window from the side and touched my arm which made me all twitchy, lol
 
I recently went for a walk on a nice peninsula near a nuclear power plant, and saw the most MASSIVE spiders i've ever seen in scandinavia. They had a huge body, hairy legs and a very graphic multi-colored back.
Must have been radioactive mutant mega-spiders.
 
am i right that spiders form the number 1 "irrational" fear - (certainly irrational in the UK anyway....)?

I've been told a couple of reasons for this....

one is that we grew up in the plains of africa, living outdoors and vulnerable to some very poisonous spiders....and so early humans learned to fear spiders....and this has been passed on biologically to us house dwellers in London.....

another reason i was told regards our experiences as babies - apparently we swallow a number of spiders in our lifetimes....whilst asleep of course......but such experiences for a baby can happen whilst conscious - because they're pretty helpless lumps....:D And it's this trauma that leads some people to have an irrational fear of spiders.....

now....i've absolutely no idea on the scientific consensus on this subject - so i'd be pretty interested to know - why am i scared ****less of a creature many times smaller than me, non-aggressive, likely to run away if i approach, and completely harmless??:eek:
 
Overman said:
My mother got bitten by a brown recluse spider when we lived in Texas. They are real small and have a small violin shaped mark on them. They are the second most poisenous spider in the US and are more common than the Black Widow. She had to have a whole cut in her leg where the doctors pulled out dead tissue. The process was repeated. It sucked. I hate spiders but wow are they amazing!
Click to expand...
I live in the frigid northeast (US), and a few years ago a woman had to be treated in the hospital in much the same way. Brown recluses aren’t indigenous -- apparently, the thing hitched a ride on a package she received through the mail.

I don’t know why people mess with anthrax.
 
andyandy said:
am i right that spiders form the number 1 "irrational" fear - (certainly irrational in the UK anyway....)?

I've been told a couple of reasons for this....

one is that we grew up in the plains of africa, living outdoors and vulnerable to some very poisonous spiders....and so early humans learned to fear spiders....and this has been passed on biologically to us house dwellers in London.....

another reason i was told regards our experiences as babies - apparently we swallow a number of spiders in our lifetimes....whilst asleep of course......but such experiences for a baby can happen whilst conscious - because they're pretty helpless lumps....:D And it's this trauma that leads some people to have an irrational fear of spiders.....

now....i've absolutely no idea on the scientific consensus on this subject - so i'd be pretty interested to know - why am i scared ****less of a creature many times smaller than me, non-aggressive, likely to run away if i approach, and completely harmless??:eek:
Click to expand...

But then again, the spider is seen in some African religions as a goddess - Anansi. So the progression of that myth is possibly one where good became evil in the same way that snakes were revered in one culture but hated in another tradition. I don't think it's a coincidence that snakes and spiders are two of the most phobic of creatures. Wolf spiders can give a painful bite, I'm told - but I've never been bitten myself. If you're gentle, you can pick them up without any problem. I've done this many times, having found large ones under rocks next to ponds. They are very excitable, panic-aholics, and I certainly wouldn't recommend doing what I do, as I probably just never got what I deserved. But I much prefer a spider in the house to a wasp. I don't even throw them outside when I see them. They eat the flies.

That brown recluse isn't as small as you'd think, but it is a bit smaller than the black widow - the problem with both of them is that they tend to be hidden (here's the part where I'm going to scare the crap out of you arachniphobes), in problematic places like shoes and gloves. I've seen them both at zoos and herpetariums - the recluse is about 5CM from leg-tip to leg-tip if my memory is correct, but they're hard to spot in natural settings. Black widow was easily 7.5CM leg to leg, if not more. The first one I saw (in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum) was much bigger than I expected, and is unmistakable. There are smaller shiny black spiders that somewhat resemble the widow, and I'm sure plenty are crushed due to mistaken identity. But there are also immature widows that are white and kinda psychedelic in color. I see them all the time. Here's a link:

http://kaweahoaks.com/html/latrodectus_hesoerus.html

Insecticides apparently work on widows, I might add.

As for the eating of spiders in our sleep, it's BS. Here's a snopes.com take on it. http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.htm

I had wondered, how exactly do they know that? What sadistic lab-technician watched people in their sleep and didn't wake them up when spiders crawled in their mouths? And were these the small, spindly kind you find making cobwebs on BBQ grills and picnic tables, or do people occasionally cruch on a tarantula in the middle of the night to skew the average (I would imagine one tarantula would still count as just one spider)? Enough people are arachniphobes that it doesn't surprise me how many people think this is fact.
 
andyandy said:
am i right that spiders form the number 1 "irrational" fear - (certainly irrational in the UK anyway....)?

I've been told a couple of reasons for this....

one is that we grew up in the plains of africa, living outdoors and vulnerable to some very poisonous spiders....and so early humans learned to fear spiders....and this has been passed on biologically to us house dwellers in London.....

another reason i was told regards our experiences as babies - apparently we swallow a number of spiders in our lifetimes....whilst asleep of course......but such experiences for a baby can happen whilst conscious - because they're pretty helpless lumps....:D And it's this trauma that leads some people to have an irrational fear of spiders.....

now....i've absolutely no idea on the scientific consensus on this subject - so i'd be pretty interested to know - why am i scared ****less of a creature many times smaller than me, non-aggressive, likely to run away if i approach, and completely harmless??:eek:
Click to expand...

Congratulations you are a certified arachnophobe! You have arachnophobia and it is irrational although spiders do cause necrotic arachnidism: Necrotic (=death of tissue) arachnidism (=caused by a spider). Most cases of tissue lesions causing necrosis are blamed on spiders even when there is no evidence that a spider was involved. If you have the spider (dead or alive) and know it's the cause then you can be sure it caused the tissue lesions you are suffering. No venomous spider bite in the U.S. is universally fatal in of itself including that of the black widow (Latrodectus) but it is extremely painful.

In Australia doctors blame necrotic lesions on the white-tailed spider but toxin experts down under say this is not true. The same type of mythos exists in the U.S. with the brown recluse.

Spiders are handy to have around. They eat other bugs including serious indoor pests such as ants and roaches as well as garden pests that destroy vegetation. We need more spiders, nature's exterminator.

As far as phobias is concerned snakes and spiders probably tie each other for the#1 spot. Personally I am scared of sharks. Chimps allegedly also have an inherent fear of snakes. They will hoot and scream even at the sight of a snake-like length of rope.
 
Last edited:
Overman said:
My mother got bitten by a brown recluse spider when we lived in Texas. They are real small and have a small violin shaped mark on them. They are the second most poisenous spider in the US and are more common than the Black Widow. She had to have a whole cut in her leg where the doctors pulled out dead tissue. The process was repeated. It sucked. I hate spiders but wow are they amazing!
Click to expand...

I spent the better part of a week in a hospital because of a BR bite. After 30-odd years, there's hardly much of a scar left, mentally that is.

I don't fear spiders so much as I find then icky and...makes me shake my arms and wrists like a girl.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom