Black house spider

 

It's often mistaken for a funnel-web spider, and it is indeed venomous, but not deadly. It's to be found all over our houses, usually in or around its big funnel-shaped or furry-sheet-shaped webs high on our walls. Funnel-web spiders tend to be low down, usually on the ground, and their homes are underground.

This one was behind the garden hose reel which I rudely removed the other day.

The black house spider also goes by the name of Badumna insignis.

White-tailed house spider

Another visitor today: this white-tailed house spider. Probably a long term resident, actually. They're pretty common.

They have a painful bite, and are often accused of causing necrotising arachnidism, a nasty skin condition. Scientific studies seem to be divided over whether this is actually the case though.

I didn't take the chance. I escorted her safely out to  a far corner of the garden.

Spider wasp1 : Huntsman spider 0

And I think that's the usual score. I encountered this scene near the beach this morning. 

An orange spider wasp was dragging its zombiefied huntsman spider victim towards its lair. It's big and it's a striking orange and black colour. It paralyses its victim, and then entombs it after laying an egg on it. The hatched pupa goes on to feed on the spider s it grows up.

I was intrigued to find this story about this very activity in the London Sun, no less. If you want a good scary Australian spider story, or snake story, or maybe a surfing duck or two, check out the UK media! It's often all they want from Australia: London Sun article

Red-headed and lethal as........

I think I'd seen pictures of these, but the one we came across the other day on my Blue Mountains bushwalk was probably the first I'd actually met. It's a red-headed mouse spider (Missulena occatoria). It's a similar size and shape to the Sydney funnel-web. And according to the Australian Museum, its venom is potentially as dangerous.

We didn't know any of this at the time, and to check whether or not this thing was in fact a type of funnel-web, we subjected it to the gold-standard test: we waved a stick at it. If it reared up and prepared to lunge, we'd been led to believe, then it's a funnel-web. It didn't, but we kept our distance anyway.

Eats mates and bushwalkers

A lot of female spiders do indeed eat their mates. In this case the male Golden Orb Weaver is yet to be eaten. He's the tiny little speck just above the much bigger female spider. The bushwalkers stopped just in time to avoid being entangled in the web we stumbled on during our Blue Mountains bushwalk last week.

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.

Spider season

We've had a superb spider season this year in Sydney's suburbs. It came a bit late, probably something to do with a warm and dry February and March. But for a few weeks leading up to the very wet recent patch we had a very fine crop of eight-legged pets.

            Those pictured here were all living with us in our garden. There's a garden orb weaver, a leaf-curl spider (lots and lots of them), a St Andrews Cross (a bit under-represented this year), and a very handsome redback. The latter isn't as deadly as sometimes alleged, so I've accommodated this one on the understanding that it stays in its crevice under the front steps. It played dead when posed for the photo, but was actually quite healthy, and ran off to establish its web in its new home as soon as I released it.