8 Legged Friends

Just a simple update before I sit for my finals. Here are 2 venomous spiders I saw a few days ago. One was actually squatting in my room. I caught it without knowing it was mildly venomous. Nothing personal. It just wasn't supposed to be there, so I released it after observing it for 3 hours in a cookie jar.

Black House Spider. It's bigger than it looks here.

It took me some time to ID that one. I knew of Black House Spiders but I couldn't remember what they looked like. Shingun helped a lot, mainly by providing close-up images of specimens on the internet for comparison, and warning me to never, ever, ever, ever catch another one again.

Black House Spider bites give you headaches and make you nauseous. Non lethal. Just troublesome.

This next one is the lethal one.

The famed Red Back Spider.

This Red Back was found around Janet's house (her life's always very interesting). The only reason I had the guts to take this photo was because the spider and I were separated by a layer of glass.

You may remember that in a previous posts about spiders in Australia, I wrote that the Red Back is a cousin of the Black Widow. A Red Back sting and put you into a coma, cause paralysis, and eventually kill you. Fortunately this spider hasn't killed a human in 50 years because the anti-venom is now widely available.

I believe I deserve some congratulations for surviving thus far in this hostile land...