My brother’s daughter lives in Australia with her husband, who is in the military (U. S. Navy), and two kids. To make a long story short, a friend of hers posted in Facebook about a problem with spiders there. To hear this person tell it, these spiders are the size of wildcats and even eat people. Wikipedia has no references to such spiders, even under the subheads for Australia. What’s the Straight Dope on Australian spiders?
You need to take them seriously and several are sizeable but they are not likely to kill you. If you are coming from somewhere where spiders are not even on the radar as something to be concerned about I can see how this would freak some people out. It’s like non-US people coming there thinking everyone is packing and it’s like the wild west.
Uhhh…
Well, imagine that :).
I’m guessing you probably know it is physically impossible for any active land invertebrate to get that big. The largest spider in the world is the Goliath Birdeater, which while pretty darn huge for a spider still weighs less than half a pound. They’re from the Americas.
Australia does have some quite large spiders in the huntsman group. If you’re an arachnophobe I imagine they’re fairly terrifying. But they’ll only be eating you in your nightmares. The largest creature that has much to worry about is a mouse or bat.
It is a longstanding “meme” to wildly exaggerate Australia’s dangerous animals. Do a google image search for “australian animals meme” and you will find many examples.
I grew up in Australia and spent a lot of time running around the nature reserves near our house which were thick bush for the most part. And this was in the prime area for Sydney funnelwebs. I saw spiders and snakes plenty of times, never bitten by one. Really just be sensible and don’t go putting your hands inside holes in trees or under logs etc. If you see a snake stop and make some noise then move slowly away from it. Mostly snakes are not aggressive and you’re too big to be prey so it will slide way.
If you’re doing things like cleaning out an old shed you’d wear gloves in case there was a spider under something, but thats pretty sensible advice in any country (because of unknown sharp items etc).
If I found a huntman or another harmless spider inside my house I’d leave it alone (it eats mosquitos and flies). If it was a red back or a funnelweb, you just spray it from a distance, thats generally safer than trying to squash them with a shoe or something (yes funnelwebs can jump…)
nitpick: There are land crabs that can reach a metre (3 feet) in legspan. The limiting factor on how big spiders can get is not the invertebrate part, but their respiratory system.
My niece and her family live in Alice Springs–I know where that is. I thank those who have given me factual information on Australia’s eight-legged critters. I personally prefer to defend spiders as insectivores and something best left alone.
The largest ones are generally the friendliest.
It’s not a problem, the big Huntsmen are extremely rare.
Drop bears usually gorge themselves on all oversized arachnids they can find well before they can grow to that size.
I will never complain about Canadian weather ever again.
I walked past some regular garden spiders yesterday - they handing in webs between trees. They were 10 cm leg span…
Australian East Tarantula - Tarantula the Theraphosidae family not the european Tarantula - grows to 20 cm and have what looks like thick legs and large body… perhaps due to hair making them seem larger. I have had one of them on my car ! (I think it hitched a ride from interstate on a campervan RV thing ), There is a town in Queensland which regularly has plagues of 20cm leg span tarantula.
Australian kids are getting much better education now on spiders than in my day. My daughter was completely unphased by a large* huntsman that used to live in her bedroom under a poster above her bed.
And another thing, OP, if that is your real name - you said that your niece’s husband was in the Navy, and then you said he was in Alice Springs. For those who don’t know, the Alice is roughly smack in the middle of Australia. The nearest coast is more than 1500 km away!! The only nautical vessels are in the dry-as-dust Todd River.
We may just slightly stretch the truth on just how big our spiders are but it sounds like you’re trying to have a massive lend of us. Just what gives here?
- measured against a coffee mug - legs still sticking out on all sides.
Interesting that one of the 10 is an apparently recent import from the US, the brown recluse. Which won’t necessarily kill you, but will give you a nasty hole in your flesh. (And that is on the smaller side as brown recluse bite damage goes.)
Perhaps the Oils know:
[plink] - sound of penny dropping.
If the OP doesn’t give that reason, then we’ll know it true.
(In case you aren’t familiar with the name, Pine Gap is a secret CIA satellite base - see Wikipedia)
Sounds as secret as our nuclear bunker
I believe Posters ## 17 and 18 have explained the matter of my nephew’s Navy venue. In deference to him and his family I believe I need elaborate no further.
Not all naval bases are on the water. There are communication stations (NAVCOMSTA) in all sorts of landlocked locations. In this case, it’s Navy Information Operations Detachment (NIOD) Alice Springs.