A man was on holiday and purchased this cactus that he thought looked nice to add to his other collection of the plant. Anyway he brings it back home from a foreign country and the plant is placed in quarantine for two months which is apparently a normal thing to do.
So he gets his plant and plants it in his back garden and it gros as normal over the next couple of years.
He goes out to water it one day and he notices that as he sprays the water on it and he notices the plant ‘shivers’.
So as the story goes hes knows a fair bit about plants and this is very strane so he rings some specialist who appears concerns and says hel ring a specialist. So the specialist rings the man back and asks him all sorts of questions about the cactus and appears to get extremely worries and tells the man to get his wife and his kids out of the house, and that hes sending a police man round and hed be there himself in a few minutes. The man turns up with the firebrigade and gets on of the firemen to use one of those flame guns on the plant and kills it.
The man starts asking the specialist whys hes done this and the specialist brings the man up to the charred remains of the cactus and peels back at the skin and inside are the burnt bodies of hundreds of spiders, apparently posionous.
Now heres the OMG part!!!
The reason the cactus had started to shiver was because way back when the first spider ate its way into the cactus it laid its eggs. Lots of eggs. They then live and grow up in the cactus until they are old enough to burst out.
Yes thats Burst out.
Apparently the cactus ‘explodes’
Spiders go everywhere.
My skin is crawling.
ick.
Anyway i dont know how true it is, but its still rotten!
You all are cordially invited to come visit me. Now, while the spiders are in full bloom. That’s right, folks, somewhere in my little apartment dozens of egg sacks have loosed their contents. Miniscule spiders are ‘ballooning’ everyFREAKINGwhere. They float in front of my face as I type this. They play kamikaze into my coffee. The vacuum cleaner has seen more use this week than in the prior 2 months. Three fans are exhausting the air as I try to disrupt the little buggers’ FAA approved flight paths. Long sleeves are de rigueur. The Book of Death™ is always within reach. (Spy airborne beastie. Open book. Beastie becomes punctuation mark in book. Ad nauseam.) I haven’t eaten in my home for a week because of the unwanted protein wafting around.
Peri, I thought you were living out near a jungle or something from your post, but i see your ocation says Chicago, remind me never to go there!!
FairyDust, I always meant to check that out but always forgot! Thanks!! Least now I know none of my parents cactus will ever explode with lots of spiders!
As everyone probably know because of my name, I LOOOOOVE spiders. They’re soo cool. Yeah they’re creepy, but they’re still cool to watch. I’m the Official Spider Saver in my house.
For some reason, I read this as “pregnant live beaver”. Talk about an image…
I’ll admit, spiders can make me skittish when they’re fast; but you have to remember: they’re on YOUR SIDE. They eat all the other creepy-crawlies. Catch 'em and let 'em go outside. We need the leggy mofos.
peri, how have you been able to put up with that? I’m sure that if there were 1/10 that many spiders at my house, I’d leave. I’m far too scared of the things to sit around like that.
Dijon Warlock, I know they eat other creepy crawly things, but I’m not scared of other bugs. Well, I am, but not as scared of them as I am of spiders.
Well, it’s not as if I’m sitting still, waiting to be bound up in webs. I am systematically vacuuming, hosing down, disassembling, washing everything in my place in order to get a handle on it.
One of my sisters suggested taking the animals and staying somewhere else for a couple weeks. Not very well thought out. I can continue in my efforts to massacre the hundreds of teeny-tiny beasts now living in my apartment or, Dear Sister, I can leave them alone to feed and grow up and come back in a few weeks to a stage set from 8 Legged Freaks.
Spiders are nature’s way of concerntrating the invertebrate biomass in your house, making it more easily squishable.
My spiders and I have a nice little truce going. They hang out in the corners. I don’t disturb currently occupied webs. They eat flies and whatnot. Any spiders building webs within two feet of the toilet get squishinated. If you’re shopping for spiders, I highly recommend picking up a few daddy-longlegs (Pholcus phalangioides). They are polite, voracious, and–here’s the best thing–they eat other less-polite species of spiders.
I think it’s partially because I can’t remember the last time I had wild crabs crawl in a window and build nests in my house. And if I had a lobster infestation, I’d just go out and buy a lot of butter.
I used to take the Girl Scout troop camping at the GS camp on the shores of Lake Travis outside Austin, where at the right time of year the inside ceilings of the cabins would be so thick with daddy longlegs it looked like a black furry mass on the ceiling. Needless to say, we’d take brooms to the ceilings before anyone would even THINK of sleeping in there!
Spiders I can deal with, for some reason. But leeches, or something that even LOOKS like a leech? I was out in the bushes of our backyard looking for a dog toy recently, and when I came in the house I looked down and …
AAAAAAAAAUUUUGGHHHHHH! THERE’S A [size=4]LEECH ON MY LEG!!![/size]
I don’t know if it WAS a leech, but it was close enough for government work! I proceeded, according to my family (I don’t remember, I was too freaked), to leap to my feet and start spinning in circles while screaming.
But in my own favor, I’ll say that I DID run into the kitchen and grab a paper towel to pull the thing off my leg, which I was able to do because getting RID of the thing was marginally better than LEAVING it where it was.
I’m told I did at least two full 360s while screaming before I could even get a word out. They’ll laugh at me over this one for YEARS…sigh…
I never kill spiders. I just watch them until they scurry away into a dark corner where I let them be.
What I DO hate are moths. They fly around utterly without co-ordination, bumping into all kinds of things - maybe even YOU. Then, they go quiet for a little while. But then it happens…you hear that buzzing din of their wings as they come back to life, rising to the light like the phoneix reborn from flame!
What is it with spiders and bathrooms? They must have some kind of decorative preference for tile.
Can’t stand spiders. I remember showering at mum and dad’s once only to look up and see little baby spiders all over the bathroom. I ran out of there naked, wet, screaming and not caring who saw me.
Funny spider story I thought I would share. I was in the middle of a rather large lecture and i felt something on my leg. I look down, and of course, there is a spider a good inch and a half across crawling up my leg. So as calmly as possible, I jump up trying to knock the damn thing off and yell “OH SHIT.” Did I mention this lecture was an Accounting class at the Kelley School of Business at IU and the room, which seats ~350, was full. Yeah, that got a laugh or two. I was in about the third row and about 10 feet away from the prof. She just looked at me and shook her head.
