Those eight-legged beasties

[SPman]

They deep fry bird eating spiders in a small village in central Vietnam - taste like salty crisps, apparently............


This is second hand from a student I know who was there 2 yrs ago - he tried them just so he could say he had.......

[Pixie]

Well, I go to get ready for bed, decide to put my washing away. So I open the drawer that has my undies in, and after dropping in the clean washing, go to close the drawer and notice a bloody big spider!! I mean Bloody big!! One of the biggest Huntsmans I have ever seen. This "mini-Tarantula" had been in my drawer for who knows how long? I left the drawer slightly ajar for a few nights not bothering to close it properly. Luckily the spider was facing down, and it was a female too. They can get really aggressive.

I killed it with Bagon, as Big Dave can tell you all about. As an insecticide I don't think it would be allowed in NZ. Anyway, this monster stars running all around the bedroom!! I haven't found the bosy, so it or some of it's rellies might come back. They're nocturnal too so they run all around the house while you're asleep! They're related to the Auckland Avondale Spider, but bigger, faster and meaner! Couldn't keep 'em as pets. I tried but the last one in thwe house chased me running along the cieling. I couldn't move without the thing hooning it after me! The sorta shit you see in a B-grade horror flick! "Arachnaphobia" anyone? Below is a picture from a website of one of these Beasties' favourate possies, and that's a real spider:

The Avondale spiders are huntsmen,having come into the country on timber for the avondale racecourse in the '20s or '30s.They don't grow as big because of environmental differences.
The spiders for the movie Arachnophobia were huntsmen (avondale ) bred by the DSIR in Auckland under contract to the movie producers and shipped to Hollywood.
http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/re...s/avondale.asp

http://www.xs4all.nl/~ednieuw/austra.../Huntsman.html

Look, he's crawling up my wall
Black and hairy, very small
Now he's up above my head
Hanging by a little thread

Boris the spider
Boris the spider

Now he's dropped on to the floor
Heading for the bedroom door
Maybe he's as scared as me
Where's he gone now, I can't see

Boris the spider
Boris the spider

Creepy, crawly
Creepy, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly

There he is wrapped in a ball
Doesn't seem to move at all
Perhaps he's dead, I'll just make sure
Pick this book up off the floor

Boris the spider
Boris the spider

Creepy, crawly
Creepy, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly
Creepy, creepy, crawly, crawly

He's come to a sticky end
Don't think he will ever mend
Never more will he crawl 'round
He's embedded in the ground

Boris the spider
Boris the spider

[yungatart]

I'd rather have spiders (not that I like them) than the huge disgusting cockroaches you get in HB - some of them make that spider look small!! Mstrs catches them in a serviette or paper towel and throws them down the waste master, followed by copious amount of disinfectant filthy, disease ridden, prehistoric things.
hXc and I hide until the job is done...

[Hillbilly]

I guess you wouldn't like "Joe's Apartment" then? The cockroaches here are huge too. We've just had a massive poulation explosion of cicadas. Like every other bug, there were around 2-3 times bigger than the Kiwi ones. Thousands of them covered the trees. What really surprised me was that they actually mimicked the birds!! Where are the Kookaburra's when you need them.

At night there were no fewer than 38 of these beasties around the front door. When I tried to open it to get in they all went bezerk, started getting really noisy and jumped all over me. Maybe I souln't have killed that huntsman....

[Flyingpony]

So the Sydney area has these lovely big insects, what about Canberra and Melbourne and Brisbane and Perth? Suspect they'd have them too, right?

Hmm, looks like one of the first things I'd have to buy when going to Aussie is some sort of Cyanide insect spray

Got the feeling that catching those insects with an ice cream container like I do here, won't be safe or efficient.