Now milking.......spiders!

The Australian Museum is putting on a good little show.

There's an exhibition called 'Spiders - Alive & Deadly', and it's well worth a visit. If you just find spiders fascinating, or if like us, you find them crawling around the house, and would like to better tell which ones are harmless, and which ones are totally deadly, then it's for you.




There's a daily demonstration of venom milking too. Spider venom is used for pharmaceutical and pesticide research. Spider venom contains hundreds of compounds which could be effective for all kinds of purposes.

My main interest was to improve my spider identification skills, and there was lots of material available to assist in this.

As well as live spider exhibits (where they were sometimes hiding from view of course), there were lots of dead exhibits on offer.




In Sydney, we do of course have the world's deadliest spider, the Sydney Funnel Web. That's probably disputed by the Brazilians, who have the Brazilian wandering spider, but let's be parochial for a while. We're all rather keen to be able to distinguish between our funnel webs and the other local species who sometimes look remarkably similar.

So here are the male and female Sydney Funnel Webs. The male is the deadlier, but the female's bigger.







And here are the Brown  Trapdoor spiders.

We also came across a Black House Spider in the hallway this morning, and they're a bit similar.


Below: a close-up male Sydney Funnel Web.