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.

Killer wasps and zombie spiders!

I watched this epic drama unfold the other day. A large, brightly coloured native wasp - a mud-dauber wasp in fact - was dragging an even larger spider - I think it was a black house spider, though I only got a view of the underside - through the front garden, down the steps to the garage, along the floor, and up the wall at the back.




The spider was motionless, though it didn't look dead, damaged, or misshapen in any way.

The mud dauber was no doubt in the process of constructing another cell of a nest. The spider wasn't dead, it had been paralysed by the wasp, and it was to be encased in the mud cell, along with a wasp egg. The egg will hatch, and the larva will feed on the live zombie spider. When it's bigger and stronger, the larva will become a pupa, and eventually an adult wasp will emerge from the nest.

These days I watch these things unfold with interest and admiration. I must admit though, that when I first encountered mud dauber nests on the house walls a few years ago, I just destroyed them without much thought. Here are pictures before and after one of these destructive events. You can see the cocoons containing the pupae, and also the skeletal remains of the eaten-up zombie spiders.