Some people love spiders and regard them as very interesting, beautiful, clever creatures. I can appreciate their intelligence and understand their special place in Nature but please don't ask me to get too close!
Something horrible came out from underneath our couch the other night. It was about the size of a tennis ball, all hairy and the colour of our dog. As we watched aghast, it moved, advancing slowly across the floor. A closer inspection (not by me) revealed it to be a big huntsman wearing an enormous dog-hair coat. A huge cluster of accumulated dog hairs on long hairy legs. I am still recovering.
Close Encounters of the Eight-legged Kind
Isn't it sad what the fear of spiders can do to a grown human, well, to some of us anyway. While many people enjoy ghost stories and Halloween happenings, we arachnophobics scare each other witless with stories of spiders in bedrooms, spiders in toilets, and worst of all, spiders in cars.
And we know what causes all those unexplained single vehicle accidents.
A friend of our daughter’s was cruising along the highway on his motorbike recently when suddenly his vision was totally blocked by a huge huntsman, millimetres from his face, on the inside of his visor. He ran off the road of course, and the people who stopped to help wondered why he was jumping up and down, desperately trying to remove his helmet and bellowing loudly.
My husband was working for the Department of Agriculture when he was asked to check out a sighting of several red-back spiders at a country bowls club. Redbacks (known as black widows in some countries) are small and quite shy but, unlike the large hairy huntsman, they are poisonous and their bites can be fatal. So off he went to the bowls club and was shown the outside sunken bowling green where the redbacks had been seen. He lifted one end of a thick black matting cover that hung over the edge of the grassy bank surrounding the greens area and there they were – a seething mass of literally thousands of redbacks ! The bowlers and observers had been literally sitting on them for who knows how long.
Redbacks are common in Tasmania and we have had many nests of them in our garden over the years. We teach our children early to avoid them. Strangely they don’t frighten me as much as the harmless huntsman. I think it is a size thing.
Spider Lovers
Some people actually like spiders. I find that hard to believe, but I know it's true. I once met a guy who had a pet huntsman. He spoke about Herbie the huntsman fondly, like the rest of us talk about Lassie. He fed Herbie freshly caught flies by hand. He wandered around the house, watching TV, making coffee, all the while with the hairy beastie snoozing on his shoulder or scampering around in his hair. Oh dear. Herbie lived on the ceiling in his bedroom, and often in the night he would literally drop in to visit my friend, landing on his bed and sometimes on him. And this guy wondered why his girlfriends never came back!
Another friend uses a slow broom as a sheep dog to herd hunstmen. He says they herd well, toddling obediently ahead of the broom, across the ceiling, along the floor and right out the door.
Tarantulas
There was a TV documentary not long ago about the Amazon. It showed tribesmen hunting for deadly poisonous, dinner-plate sized tarantulas - to eat. Can you bear it? The tarantulas live in huge burrows, like wombats, (and almost as big). The hunter tickles the entrance to the burrow gently with a long piece of grass, and when the creature dashes out, the hunter, hiding above the burrow, pins the spider to the ground with a finger in the middle of its back. Then one by one he bends all the legs backwards across its back and rolls it up like a pancake, and then moves on to the next burrow. When he has enough tarantula pancakes, he carries them back, alive, to the village for the feast. Can you imagine what would happen if he dropped them? Onto the fire they go and are quickly barbecued. According to the documentary, they are very crunchy and tasty. I would starve.
Films like this should be triple X-rated.
Information on Tasmanian Spiders
Heather Donaldson - Heather Donaldson is a writer, a registered nurse with a diploma in nutrition, an interest in natural medicine, animals and environment.
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