Spiders: Relocated from our internal forums

[Arumakani]

Hey OrbWeaver... Were you ever picked on at school?

[Schatten]

hornets

 

Don't know about the Aussie brand of hornets, but the ones we've got here are very peacefull sports. And they eat away the wasps, too. Actually, pretty much all buzzing black-yellow things here are rather timid. We've got a wasp hive the size of a football right infront of our bathroom window, they don't even mind when we sprinkle the garden - and wasps have usually the shortest temper of the stingy insects around here. Thankfully we don't have yellow-jackets.

[Crispy]

Actually we (I too am a Canberra resident) do, but they aren't the dreaded Sydney funnelwebs, they are smaller, longer and less agressive, though still almost as deadly if you get bitten (the Kosciusko funnelweb, Hadronyche sp).

Huh, okay. I've never seen one. Then again I tend to stay indoors a lot.

 

There is also the white tail spider (Lampona cylindrata, Lampona murina)which is fairly common in Canberra, which has been implicated in causing ulcerative lesions and necrotising arachnidism, however a fairly exhaustive study by the CSIRO found no evidence that white tails are harmful, other than causing a painful bite. Nevertheless, many people still perceive these spiders as dangerous (well, unless you are allergic to them, all you will get is a very painful bite that lasts for weeks)

"Painful bite that lasts for weeks" is dangerous enough for me.

 

Hey OrbWeaver... Were you ever picked on at school?

What kind of a question is that?

[Arumakani]

I was wondering as he seems to know a bit about everything. He may have been picked on by the jocks.

[OrbWeaver]

Yeah but I made the jocks disappear with my l33t Nerd Science.

[Domarius]

Spiders!

 

I was slightly arachnophobic when I was a kid, but I guess everyone is to a certain degree.

Once I was walking under our patio outside and felt something light and tickly land on the back of my neck. Before I could even comprehend what was going on, my right hand had gone back and grabbed whatever it was in a tight fist and thrown it to the ground, in one sharp Bruce Lee type movement (acompanied by the appropriate sound if I remember correctly).

 

As I stood there in the final pose (Bruce Lee style) I saw the attacker floating to the ground. It was white and square. It was the (now cleanly torn off) washing instructions tag from the t-shirt I was wearing.

[OrbWeaver]

I was slightly arachnophobic when I was a kid, but I guess everyone is to a certain degree.

 

Actually no, arachnophobia is a learned behaviour not an innate one. Young children are not frightened of spiders unless they learn it from their parents, although as they grow up they are likely to develop a certain unease due to the large number of negative cultural associations.

[Arumakani]

HEHEHE...you really are a know it all Orb. Were you an Oxbridge student?

[Domarius]

Actually no, arachnophobia is a learned behaviour not an innate one. Young children are not frightened of spiders unless they learn it from their parents, although as they grow up they are likely to develop a certain unease due to the large number of negative cultural associations.

Well all I remember is that I was informed they were poisonous, and they definetly look ugly and menacing. That's what made me scared of them. And the thought of something like that stabbing its fangs into you.

 

I remember seeing a documentary where they were showing how dangerous animals naturally look unpleasant to us, as a primal protection mechanism.

[Crispy]

I have a story that's mildly similar to that, but different...

 

I was standing in the bathroom leaning against the basin one morning cleaning my teeth. Our basin is very low; about hip height. I was still in my boxer shorts and slightly groggy, so when I felt the hairs on my leg move in the draft from the door I didn't think much of it. They kept tingling, though, so I absently brushed my hand over my leg to flatten them down. It came away covered with dozens of tiny tiny spiders. A batch of daddy long leg eggs (the real spider kind) had just hatched underneath the basin and crawled across the basin onto my shorts and down my legs!

 

It was more of a nuisance than anything, but still. What are the chances.

[Schatten]

There was one day here when a lot of baby spiders grabbed a length of spider silk and sailed away to new lands - I was taking a walk and there were so many spiders in the air that it felt like walking through one giant spider web.

[Schatten]

Thankfully we don't have yellow-jackets.

 

Boy, I didn't know how right I was there!

[Maximius]

Im not a huge fan of spiders but they dont scare me like these lightening fast, tiger striped centipedes we have in Pennsylvania. They arent very big, never seen one over two inches long, but theymove so Fucking fast across a wall that your heart nearly stops. While in school, my house was crawling with those goddamned things. We started getting them in our new apartment here in Philly too.

[Ishtvan]

Boy, I didn't know how right I was there!

 

Great, I guess another unforseen consequence of global warming is yellowjackets taking ove the world.

[AluminumHaste]

Well here are my spider picks for this thread:

 

[AluminumHaste]

Im not a huge fan of spiders but they dont scare me like these lightening fast, tiger striped centipedes we have in Pennsylvania. They arent very big, never seen one over two inches long, but theymove so Fucking fast across a wall that your heart nearly stops. While in school, my house was crawling with those goddamned things. We started getting them in our new apartment here in Philly too.

 

 

What about these centipedes??

[demagogue]

The other day, I was washing my hands, and when I went to dry them it felt like my hand was rubbing against a wad of threads tucked in the towel. When I pulled my hand out a big brown spider was climbing up it. That gave me quite a shock, but fortunately despite the agitation of being rubbed against my hand, the spider never bit me. I shook it to the floor and then promptly ignored it.

 

As long as we're on this ghastly topic...

 

A similar thing (as the above quote, from a while back) happened to me as a kid, except:

- instead of a big brown spider it was a scorpian

- instead of a hand-towel it was a bath towel as I was getting out of a bath

- the scorpian actually did bite me

- very high on the right thigh, near the joint.

 

Totally oblivious I wrapped the towel around myself and felt a sharp prick, and almost dreamlike I let the towel fall down and saw the scorpian scurry out. And it literally took me a few seconds to comprehend the connection until my leg started burning. And I cried out, not from the pain but because I had no idea what a bite like that could do to me. My parents called poison control and we had to make a paste to cover the swelling bite ... and the whole time I was just in a daze. It was pretty surreal.

 

That right there beats my second story where, on a trampoline, a cruising wasp got annoyed at our bouncing and bit me square between the eyes so that my eyes got swollen and I literally couldn't open them for about 4 hours.

 

Now that I think about it, I guess I grew up in a pretty dangerous place -- out in the countryside in Texas, where most everything seems big and onery.

Edited October 1, 2006 by demagogue

[Gildoran]

Is it just me, or does the spider in AluminumHaste's pictures look drugged/dead?

 

Spiders don't usually bother me much, but scorpions and especially centipedes really creep me out. That video of the centipede capturing and eating the mouse made me cringe.

 

I've been to Texas a few times, but luckily never encountered anything too nasty. I did get bitten/stung by fire-ants on more than one occasion though.

[AluminumHaste]

Is it just me, or does the spider in AluminumHaste's pictures look drugged/dead?

LOL it was very much alive, but seeing as how it was only 11 C out, it was pretty lethargic

 

I wanted to take some pictures, so I took a wipe-off board, laid it on the ground and put the spider on it. The pics were taken with a Nikon CoolPix 5700 (Not a very good camera). It's known around here as a "bananna spider" (I think)

 

Here's some info, but the one in that picture is a lot smaller than the one I took pictures of: http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http...=image&cd=3