It common practise in Australia to check your shoes before you put them on. I had an Irish exchange student stay at my house like two years ago and he thought i was joking when i explained why i was beating my shoes against a fence post and stomping on the toe end wih my heel.
The worst thing is, in winter they try and get indoors to get away from the cold.
I'm lucky, I only have water moccasins, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, black widow spiders, brown recluse spiders, Africanized honey bees, carpenter bees, What we call "corn spiders" but aren't really corn spiders because they are bigger than this
Also it looks different, there's more red on it, and the yellow bands are different. Also they only show up in large groups of at least 4 and they vibrate their webs to communicate apparently. Weather or not they're poisonous, they're creepy. Also mosquitoes. more mosquitoes than you ever thought possibly could exist in a single place at any given time. I counted 8 bites in a single square inch of skin. They will bite you through bug spray. They will bite you through the bug spray. THEY WILL BITE YOU THROUGH THE BUG SPRAY. They feed off of poison. Also the summer temperature will break triple digits several times through the year combined with %80+ humidity most of the year makes this an awesome place to live. I'm so glad I don't live in Australia.
Also there are Portuguese man of wars, sharks (Bull sharks are notorious for hating every other creature alive), and barracudas.
Edit: Also wolves, coyotes, and the occasional bobcat.
EDIT: EDIT: Also the fauna isn't very nice what with the poison oak, poison ivy, and various poison berries and shrooms.
EDIT: EDIT: EDIT: And the flesh eating virus.
EDIT: EDIT: EDIT: EDIT: And 10' gators.
Writers note, wiki'ing spiders for twenty minutes will make you feel like there are spiders all over you.
Two Australian friends who lived close to each other were talking on the server. One of them asked the other if they had heard about the Kangaroo and the shark. Apparently, a Kangaroo somehow ended up in some water off the coast and a Great White shark came along and butchered it.
I think it's a genuine example of our culture divide when I find this story in no way remarkable. Great Whites eat things, they are very big sharks, kangaroos do occasionaly follick near water, one being washed out to sea is not unheard of. Add the two together, and add in the fact that Kangaroo tastes awesome, and you get some aquatic roo-slaying.
I think people also underestimate just how lethal Crocodiles are. The regularity of 'Idiots decide to swim across river to get home, are eaten' stories shocks people who don't appreciate the casual effort it takes a 300kg Croc to bite you in half. Protip: it doesn't take much effort.
crimson5pheonix said:
Also there are Portuguese man of wars, sharks (Bull sharks are notorious for hating every other creature alive), and barracudas.
I could edit in a section on aquatic monsters, but I was just impressed with how many of our most beloved things can kill us dead, as demonstrated by the reptile park. I was most sad to find out that the Devil Facial Tumor disease has infected almost 80% of their entire population. This disease is killing the poor things off something horrible, and I was a little shocked to think that they might be gone before i'm 30. But yeah, Cthulhu isn't the nastiest thing in the waters here.
I think the Australian government should launch a campaign to wipe these things off the face of the Earth. You wouldn't keep Hitler in a zoo if he was a highly aggressive, highly poisonous species of spider, would you?
You can't just let these things hang out in a comfy zoo, enjoying life. That's like...doing the same thing...to Hitler.
If you haven't noticed I'm trying to compare these spiders to Hitler.
Then again, unlike Hitler, these spiders have no way to escape from an island continent. And since I've got the Pacific Ocean and the width of North America between them and me, I'm not too worried. Good luck with living in Australia though.
yes, lets wipe out complete species (genocide) that are vital to our eco system, and yes, im asking if you think our governement should be more like hitler, and if you're so out raged about it you come down here with a supply of bug spray and try and do something about it. this isnt america, wherein when something becomes a problem we attempt to destroy it instead of living with it
Is the spider so vital to the ecosystem that it is worth keeping it around despite the fact that it poses an extreme danger to the population?
And genocide may usually be bad, but if the "geno" itself is bad then yes, it is worth being "cided" against. Genocide isn't necessarily bad. It just always has been.
I think people also underestimate just how lethal Crocodiles are. The regularity of 'Idiots decide to swim across river to get home, are eaten' stories shocks people who don't appreciate the casual effort it takes a 300kg Croc to bite you in half. Protip: it doesn't take much effort.
People do the same thing with American Alligators. People get bitten by them all the time in Florida. Course an Alligator ain't got nothing on a salt water croc. They have jaws of steel.
I like Alligators and Crocodiles though. They're big, powerful, and inspire fear into anyone who sees one. Except for when they are little. They are adorable when young(Fun fact: Male alligators cannibalize baby alligators).
Sounds like someone isn't very confident in their country's armed forces. You Australians have guns, don't you?
Actually, from what I hear the Australian military isn't that bad. They might need bio-hazard suits made completely our of kevlar in order to reduce casualties, though. Sounds expensive.
Please can we put spoilers on the spiders, as an arachnophobe that shit is SCARY too me...sorry
But if i wasnt scared of the little fuckers, Id definatley be an expert in the buggers. They facinate me.
You see my friend, it is[/I] natural. They are the perfect hunters, They adapt to there surroundings, and nature has bestowed upon them a weapon of mass destruction.
#1 reason i dont want to go to australia. Any big insect over here (UK) is 100x bigger, Nastier & ballsyier down under.
You know there is a book written by a man named Richard Ryan titled "Funnelweb". It's set in Sydney and deals mainly with human corruption. Oh, and the funnelweb spiders get irradiated by spilled coolant from a US nuclear submarine and grow to five metres tall. No shit. It's GIANT MUTANT FUNNELWEBS TAKING OVER SYDNEY. That's the fucking story. I'm not bullshitting you. Go to your library and look it up.
I would be more scared of the hairy death trees, seriously you're a tree what's going to eat you? What the hell do you need them for! I mean, I can understand the spider, it's a spider they are all inherently evil, but seriously, a tree? I think its just showing off.
P.S. What is the name of the tree? And that was a very amusing anecdote, I laughed.
Please can we put spoilers on the spiders, as an arachnophobe that shit is SCARY too me...sorry
But if i wasnt scared of the little fuckers, Id definatley be an expert in the buggers. They facinate me.
You see my friend, it is[/I] natural. They are the perfect hunters, They adapt to there surroundings, and nature has bestowed upon them a weapon of mass destruction.
#1 reason i dont want to go to australia. Any big insect over here (UK) is 100x bigger, Nastier & ballsyier down under.
I can safely say I know what I want for christmas.
Also, people should really come to Australia, it's actually quite pleasant provided you don't do silly things. Seriously, anyone headed down under should PM me, we'll catch up and i'll show you around the cooler places. A tour bus or visitors map can't find the best spots in this country.
Quick note: You cannot drive to Ayers Rock in a day, this country is not small, we just hug the edges because the inside is really hot and we like to keep it beautiful and building-free.
Unless you live in Coober Pedy, those crazy bastards live underground and have a local shack that sells dynamite. I kid you not.
After i heard this thing's resume, i was ready to cement my house together, kick my family out first of course, drink bug spray, and pray to every god in the universe that this thing doesn't know I'm arachnophobic, which it probably does judging on it's looks(Fucking-terrifying,Pants-shitting, and Sanity-lost all come to mind when i saw this thing for the second i did.)
Then i pieced it together that it was in Australian and not America, which is the only thing good about living in America, besides we have the best place for bobble-heads, and by that i mean the congress building.
So when i realized you were fucked and i wasn't i decided to blow myself in victory until i remembered i live in the only region in North America that harbors Black widow spiders, or what i like to call them, "Those fucking things that kill everything". These things are best known in the arachnid world as the one's that eat the males head after sex(talk about bad bedside manners), and the ability to kill a man in 30-40 minutes, while not as bad ass as this funnel web terrors, it is the New England off branch of Aussie fear incorporated(copyright nineteen-ninety-die).
The good news is that spider size is limited by their respiratory systems. The bad news is that evolution is an ingenious bastard at the worst of times.
The good news is that spider size is limited by their respiratory systems. The bad news is that evolution is an ingenious bastard at the worst of times.
See, now I'm never going into my basement again. And my Playstation is down there, as well as a majority of the cloth things that either go in my room or on my body. I think I need to sue whoever the hell put that picture of a Huntsman up. Dad went to Australia on a business trip a few years back, so he told me about the Funnel-Web. He did not tell me about the arachnids the size of your face. I think I know why. That thing freaked me out.
Oh, yeah, about the dangerous animals in my area: nil. This is why I live in Northwestern Ohio.
Ever notice how 'Arachnid' sounds a bit like 'Anti-christ'? No? Have you ever noticed that some spiders are scary little suckers that hang in midair supported by silk cables that are stronger then steel and wait for shit to blunder into them? I assume you have, because occasionally people blunder into them and scream like a little girl because their face is all sticky. Well, this spider isn't like that. This spider doesn't hang in midair because Sephiroth already claimed the title 'Most Unholy Evil Prick To Float In The Sky'. The only reason it doesn't swim is because Cthulhu most likely lives off the Australian coast and there would be a turf war. We'll get to him later, there's a point to this story.
This spider is proof of God, proof that he's a malicious ass who feeds on tears and makes anime music videos of rape scenes to 'Yakity Sax'.
Most Australians don't believe our country is as bad as foreigners make out. We laugh as we are told that our wildlife is evil, chuckle and shake our heads as people declare our enviroment 'Hellish' and go back to digging up our martian red soil in the 35 degree heat. Hellish? Mate, this is paradise. Even that little bit of hyperbole was stretching things, we have some fantastic rainforests and utterly adorable swamps and wetlands and things. In short, we don't think our country is as nightmare fuelish as we are told it is... But what if it is!?
Last weekend was my Sisters birthday (The Ultra Joe has Siblings!?, do they get together and crush small nations!? As we live in different states, not so much) and as she is still of the age where she uses a training sword and can barely maul a bull elephant, and because I was in the state and the very earth cowered in fear, we decided to go and visit the Australian Reptile Park, a place now #1 on my list of 'stupid-as-dick places to seek refuge during a zombie apocalypse'. For those of you who don't know, australias reptiles aren't the most acoomodating bunch. We have the largest reptile, in the world, most commonly known as the saltwater crocodile and frequently reffered to as 'Liquid Fear'.
It had more than just reptiles, as it turns out.
We followed this one funny chap around the park as he did talks on all of the Iconic Australian animals and proved that you don't need to be sensible to work with creatures capable of removing your fingers, arms or immolating your living soul. We watched hi cheerfully fish around inside a hollow log for a Tasmanian Devil (Devil.) with his bare hand, and drag the screaming (Yes, they scream like a black god) little dervish out of the darkness. This little sucker can flood it's ears with blood to make them glow red, because it feeds on your fear. If there was a superhero named Tazzy Devil, he would eat Wolverine alive, bones and all. We watched this insane zookeeper tease them with a bloody kangaroo leg and then watched these furry chainsaws eat it.
Then he fed a 3 meter long crocodile named Elvis, I can only assume he was named Elvis because he likes to consume his own weight in hamburgers daily and can never truly die. The rotten chicken (apparently they like eating old corpses, which raises the question of how there got to be new corpses.) was so badly decayed that it fell off the feeding stick and he was forced to prove he has a deathwish and grab it out from near its mouth and toss it at the God-Lizard before he finally munched it down with one bite. For anyone who thinks this isn't that stupid, let me stress that a Salty is not your basic 'Gator. It's a Croc. In a later show he (yes, he survives to give more talks) hands a juvenile 'Gator' to some little girl he dragged into the show pit because these things are really just moving logs that snap at passing carrion. An Australian Salty equivalent was brought in, and made every attempt to go beserk and eat the trainer, the little girl, the Gator and the show pit itself. They are not friendly.
He fed some dingo's, letting the things lick all over his face in a display not unlike standing on a shooting range covered in big magnets. Why you would let the asshole of the canine world (think wolf without the class ) taste you!? You can't tame these things, they will maul and defile your corpse in an attempt to become the Alpha male. These things can take down a cow weighing hundreds of kilos trying to kick it's face in, do you think swatting it with a newspaper will stop it feeding you your own asshole?
And the snakes. Oh god, the snakes. There was a show on the snakes (I'm not even going to tell you about the show, this man is the Anti-Murphys-Law), and a large hall or two in the very cool reptile cave-thing. As stated, I have never thought of my country as Evil or that dangerous, but the nameplates alone started to erode my indoctrinated self-assurance. Death Adder. Red Bellied Black Snake (it even looks demonic). Feirce Snake. Taipan. Do you know what Taipan means in Japanese? It means 'Big Boss'. That's right, the son of a ***** Solid Snake was cloned from and who routinely kicked the collective asses of the world probably had to beg and plead to get his name from an Autralian Snake. What the hell, God!? Add in the fact that the most asshole slithery thing in the place is named simply 'Brown Snake' (perhaps the color of your trousers after you find one in your bath. I kid you not) and we get a kind of sick understanding of the creator of this continent. It was dawning on me that perhaps I was the one ignorant of the true nature of my beloved land down under.
The turning point was the Spiders.
I can live with the trees with the poison hair (every other tree forms a symbiotic relationship with animals, using them to spread seeds. There is no excuse for this tree, it is simply a jerk). I can live with the poison-torpedo shooting seashells. I forgave the jellyfish. I can look past the snakes. I can forgive the fact that both of our national animals routinely maul tourists who think they're cute, rather than malevolent and twitchy sacks of hate equipped with sonic-ram-legs. I can forgive the Blue Ringed Octopus. I can forgive the fact that Spore: Australia Edition would be MA 15+. But I cannot forgive the Sydney Funnel Web. Not in a million years will there ever be an excuse for the Sydney Funnel Web.
This is #1 on 'shit you don't want to bite you'. Period. If you get bitten by a snake, you have over 4 hours until the damage becomes chronic and sometimes up to 12 before you keel over dead (it's the heat and long distances to hospitals that make australia so nasty with snakes, that and the fact that our snakes have venom you could clean grease stains with). Not so with the SFW, the record for surviving this Eight-Legged-Armaggedon is an Hour and sixteen minutes. The record. That was a healthy, very healthy man, fully hydrated and who knew how to treat the wound and stem the flow of poison and had god on his side (fickle ass). You, unprepared and umaware, will last 40 minutes, maximum. Think how long that is, that's not a long time. That's not counting the fact that your fate is sealed after about 25 minutes, mind you, and you'd better hope the ambulance reaches you in time.
Let me give you a rundown of what a whack from this thing will do to you:
1) Agonising Pain. Not 'ow, put an ice-block on that' agony, but roll on the floor and beg for death agony. Neurotoxin is an utter ***** and will rape your nerve endings and make you see Satan.
2) Drooling. Not spit, not the pre-vomit wet-mouthness. After only 5 minutes you will drool so much and so uncontrollably you can barely breath or speak, making calling for help really hard. Did we mention agony more extreme than anything you have ever felt?
3) After this point, the fun stuff starts. You will cry, pee and crap blood, you will drool and vomit blood and the agony that once made you want to cut off your bitten limb has now spread to your entire body and is making every nerve scream for death.
And this little prick of an animal will bite you multiple times, if he can get you, because he feeds on your tears.
You die at this point. Ambulance drivers don't rush for snake bites, save to spare you prolonged pain before you get the cure. They will run red lights, scrape up against other cars and mount the sidewalk to get a funnelweb victim to the hospital, because after they've got there the guy is usually crying blood already.
If it bites your hand and you survive (making you honorarily Ultra), you will lose fingers, if it bites your foot be prepared to lose it, if it bites your face you're about to become one ugly fucker. Most of Australia's wildlife gets exaggerated in its lethality (at least I thought it did), even though everything here bar the sheep spit poison (the trees, damnit! Poison Trees!), but not the funnelweb.
look at those god damn fangs, they can drive those suckers through your toenails. I wouldn't mind the evil bastards if they lived out in the western wastes like all the rest of our anti-christ animals, but this is the, by name: Sydney Funnel Web. How is this fair? It's like having the 'Suburban Sewer Grizzly', and it weilds a chainsaw. For god's sake, it's not even a restrained arachnid bastard, it's known for being an agressive little fuck. The males, the ones with venom 10 times more potent than the females (that's right, 10 times) are designed to wander looking for females, who hide in (duh) funnel webs. Let me spell that out: It's an agressive, sadistic, overly toxic hairy asshole and it's made to wander all over sydney crawling into warm and enclosed spaces like your shoes and gloves and houses, and it can bite through your toenail when you have the audacity to wake it up in the morning. It's vexom has Hemotoxic, Neurotoxic and Necrotic effects. I don't know what that last part means exactly but Necrotic is never good and it may raise you as a zombie. Not fair.
This is what gets me. Not that it's evil, not that it's deadly, not that i'd rather burn to death while drowning rather than die of this thing, but that it has evolved and adapted in a short period of time to make Sydney (and you thought the cities were safe...) it's stomping ground. It's not natural, it's vindictive. It's proof of a malevolent God and i'll dare any person to be bitten by this sucker and not beg for divine intervention.
-----
The Point Of This Thread: The Aussie reptile park is a private venture, it gets no funding for the amazing conservation work it does for Tazzy Devils and several other endangered species. The only thing seperating these adorable and deadly critters from leaving us forever is the entry fees of those who visit the good people there.
If you wanted to see all these deadly creatures (and a whole bunch of non-lethal and cute/awesome ones as well) in a safe place, the Reptile Park is the place to go. The crazy guys there are friendly, warm and often hilarious. They love their jobs. If you're a local, a tourist, or want to see a grown man piss of an Eight-legged Satan for your amusement (and then learn to survive it), then drop by. Nature will spare you one horrible death.
The SFW has a strike range of literally 0. It's fangs are so large it can only kill things directly below its mouth, and can't move when in a striking position (see above). It can't run fast or leap at you, and if you check your shoes and don't be a dick you can survive an encounter with the little sucker (hand him into authorities to make anti-venom! Take that, SFW!)
Snakes are lazy bastards, and will not chase you. Except perhaps the Brown Snake, because it's a jerk.
Yeah, I just advertised for something. But it's based on an anecdotal good time and a genuine desire to help out the good folks at the ARP, so if you have a complaint i'm teachng Funnelwebs to jump and introducing them to your ecosystem. Whahahaha.
PS: I know exactly what Necrotic means. The bite from the SFW will bleed for so long even after it stops hurting that you may just wish it had killed you.
Oooooh, times like this, I'm glad I live in the UK.
Actually, sod that, I'd rather be bitten by a SFW than live under this government any more. And you think I'm joking...
Do you actually live in or near Sydney? I guess I'm kind of hoping not, though if you know how to avoid these things then fair enough, but it seems the SFW is the ultimate bastard of the animal world. At least in the UK we only have to deal with rabid pigeons... (though I did see a fox several times in the park opposite me, fortunately I live on the fifth floor ).
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
