Wheee, Hunstman spiders are furry friends. They're kinda freaky to have near to you, but it's only really disconcerting when they're on your living room wall in the same spot for three days straight (excellent at controlling other pests, so you leave'em alone) and then suddenly NOT THERE ANYMORE.
The Sydney Funnel Web: Unfair
- Thread starter Ultrajoe
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You'll find the majority of my comments in this thread have been deliberate eggageration and played for laughs and smiles (has anyone enjoyed this article/ad?) because this forum really needs some harmless fun in the wake of all these silly serious threads, and I wanted to try and help out the Reptile Park. Don't worry, I think the SFW is utterly beautiful, so sleek and focused to its task. I love Australia's wildlife for how perfectly it fits its environment.Insanum said:
I just found the idea of a spider being out to get us all for shits and giggles to be charming.
Did you enjoy the story?
And now it turns out they really are out to get us.Bulletinmybrain said:
Actually, only us primates are effected by its venom. How is that for logic?Insanum said:
But then we thrive one making each other cry. Hell, we even built devices to help us make people cry that is how smart we are.
Daaaaaamn. That teaches me to get think ohio is bad. We have brown recluses here (yes I KNOW that the nature books say they are only southern but they have moved up here in uhauls and are just fine), but that mutha makes the BR look like a baby panda bear.
and you had this in your head knowing you might die in the same time it takes to watch 1 episode of mythbusters?ViolentlyHappy91 said:
Yep, I came to terms with almost every Australian animal being able to kill you in a small amount of time a few years ago and keep the emergency procedures in my head. It would have been different if it had been a blue-ringed octopus, if it were, I would have gone "....************!" and proceed to die in a lot of pain within 2 minutes.PyroZombie said:
The people who don't remember this don't live to post about it.PyroZombie said:
On a similar note: It was weird to speak to people from other countries and find out that they never had a class on treating snakebite. Twice a year some crazy guy would show up with a sack full of snakes and show us the bastards before teaching us how to apply a pressure-wrap to stop venom spread around the body. From what I can gather, this is very common here in Australia but not other places. Do we have any Aussies here who were never taught how to treat snakebite?
I love the internet, I am never not amazed at how different I can be from a member of my own species. I, for example, would have no idea how to surive an encouter with a bear; I have no idea where you stab it.
Jesus fucking christ. Normally spiders don't have any effect on me, but babies...oliveira8 said:Did you really open it?xxhazyshadowsxx said:If so whats in the spoiler box.
Well...If I saw one of those I would likely try to kill it. But I was refering to these spiders:Ultrajoe said:
Yes I'm evil.
God damn.
Bears are actually just protective, and usually acting dead, or acting submissive will actually quiet it down and leave you alone.Ultrajoe said:
It's funny that i'm "push-my-grandmother-in-front-of-a-bus" afraid of something that might not even be the same height of my big finger but when i see a bear cub, who's mother can beat you with your own spinal columns, and bite your soul out, i melt instead of flee in terror.
I had those guys come to my school too, one of them was bitten by a king brown he was holding and dumped it in the bag and we got to see first hand what to do, it was awesome.Ultrajoe said:
Oh dear, the cleaning lady in my office keeps looking at me because I am laughing so hard. Regarding my part of the U.S., we aren't much for deadly animals, but I suppose we make up for it a bit when the earth itself tries to kill us. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Helens] The deadliest thing in my part of the country is the people. We are the serial killer capital of the U.S. We do a lot of familial murder too, but that wouldn't affect tourists at all. BUT! as far as emblematic animals, for my area, it's probably the Pacific salmon, which is pretty damn impressive.
They start is wee little smolts in mountain streams, swim all the way from the stream to the creek to the tributary river to the big river to the sea, where they spend a few years getting big, anywhere from 10 to 135lb, then they swim back to the stream bed where they were born, spawn, and die. Now, keep in mind that the swim back can be hundreds of miles, all upstream. They swim past bears, they swim through dams, they swim over mountains. Then they get where they are going, make a batch of baby salmon and die. You would die too, I bet, if you swam over the Coast Range, over the Cascades, through canyons full of rapids, all the way from the ocean to freakin' Idaho. Then they die and their bodies get washed back downstream.
This all creates a huge influx of protein in the spring and autumn, to the salvation of our modest collection of predators, who are either getting ready for winter and are trying to fatten up (oh, yeah, winter-that will kill you too, but that's a topic for another time) or coming out of winter and recovering from borderline starvation.
But really, when you are talking about deadly stuff you can go see in my area for which Australia has no counterpart, you are talking about things made of rocks and water. You are talking about mountains and snow.
Now, as I mentioned before, periodically, the mountains around here totally lose their cool and blow their tops in the most literal way imaginable. Imagine that lovely white form on the horizon--scenic, symmetrical, unchanging--starts to shake and grumble and fume. You know it's pissed. Like a fight with your spouse, you know it's coming but you don't know when and you don't know how bad it will be. So you try and go about your ordinary life, keeping an eye on the seismograph, trying to judge its mood, and you might have the kind of history together where you know generally how it will behave, you can make an educated guess, but no matter how closely you watch it, it will always come as a surprise when, instead of a white silhouette on the horizon, you have a mushroom cloud [http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/erupt.jpg].
The blast wave strips the trees of all their branches and knocks them over so that aerial photos of entire forests look like close-up photos of the fur on a dogs back. The avalanche of rock, and by rock, I mean the top third of the mountain [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgRnVhbfIKQ], completely fills lakes below and, basically, relocates them. By the way, the footage in the link is real.
Now the water. The thing is, all that white? That was snow. All that snow? That was water, thousands and thousands of gallons of it, enough to supply whole cities. When that water was snow, it stayed put and didn't bother anyone, but when the eruption hits, the superheated gas from the volcano flash melts that water. OH NOEZ! FLOODS! Well, yes and no. See, the gas is so hot it literally vaporizes the water on contact. That steam mixes with the rock that is carried in the blast wave to form pyroclastic flows. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroclastic_flow]
Now a pyroclastic flow isn't, as it often looks in the news footage of the time, a mudslide. It is a superheated mass of steam and pulverized rock a couple thousand degrees in temperature, about the consistency of freshly mixed cement, and it's coming roaring down the mountain at you. The mudslide, an combination of snowmelt and volcanic ash, comes later.
Oh, the ash, can't forget about that. It's so thick, it turns day into night for cities downwind. The mushroom cloud reaches all the way to the upper air currents, so the ash gets deposited over 11 states. And the ash isn't like the stuff out of your fireplace, all fluffy and light. It is silica ash. Essentially, it is powdered volcanic glass, and there is a blizzard of it falling on you. It gets into your lungs and your eyes if your face isn't covered. It gets sucked into your car's air intakes and slowly grinds the engine to death. And of course, it smothers plant and animal life, and though it looks like gray snow, it won' ever melt. Years later, that drift will be there, in that sheltered corner of your house where the wind and rain couldn't wash it away.
Now, admittedly, this doesn't happen very often. If it did, we wouldn't live here. Most of the time, the earth gets a little irritated and tries to shake us off [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisqually_Earthquake] like a dog shaking off flies.
I'll make a deal with you Joe. If I ever go to Australia, I will go to the Reptile Park. If you ever come to the U.S., go the the Mt. St. Helens National Monument.
By the way, did you know that we actually have three small, extinct volcanoes within the city limits? At least, we think they are extinct. The haven't done anything. Recently.
They start is wee little smolts in mountain streams, swim all the way from the stream to the creek to the tributary river to the big river to the sea, where they spend a few years getting big, anywhere from 10 to 135lb, then they swim back to the stream bed where they were born, spawn, and die. Now, keep in mind that the swim back can be hundreds of miles, all upstream. They swim past bears, they swim through dams, they swim over mountains. Then they get where they are going, make a batch of baby salmon and die. You would die too, I bet, if you swam over the Coast Range, over the Cascades, through canyons full of rapids, all the way from the ocean to freakin' Idaho. Then they die and their bodies get washed back downstream.
This all creates a huge influx of protein in the spring and autumn, to the salvation of our modest collection of predators, who are either getting ready for winter and are trying to fatten up (oh, yeah, winter-that will kill you too, but that's a topic for another time) or coming out of winter and recovering from borderline starvation.
But really, when you are talking about deadly stuff you can go see in my area for which Australia has no counterpart, you are talking about things made of rocks and water. You are talking about mountains and snow.
Now, as I mentioned before, periodically, the mountains around here totally lose their cool and blow their tops in the most literal way imaginable. Imagine that lovely white form on the horizon--scenic, symmetrical, unchanging--starts to shake and grumble and fume. You know it's pissed. Like a fight with your spouse, you know it's coming but you don't know when and you don't know how bad it will be. So you try and go about your ordinary life, keeping an eye on the seismograph, trying to judge its mood, and you might have the kind of history together where you know generally how it will behave, you can make an educated guess, but no matter how closely you watch it, it will always come as a surprise when, instead of a white silhouette on the horizon, you have a mushroom cloud [http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/erupt.jpg].
The blast wave strips the trees of all their branches and knocks them over so that aerial photos of entire forests look like close-up photos of the fur on a dogs back. The avalanche of rock, and by rock, I mean the top third of the mountain [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgRnVhbfIKQ], completely fills lakes below and, basically, relocates them. By the way, the footage in the link is real.
Now the water. The thing is, all that white? That was snow. All that snow? That was water, thousands and thousands of gallons of it, enough to supply whole cities. When that water was snow, it stayed put and didn't bother anyone, but when the eruption hits, the superheated gas from the volcano flash melts that water. OH NOEZ! FLOODS! Well, yes and no. See, the gas is so hot it literally vaporizes the water on contact. That steam mixes with the rock that is carried in the blast wave to form pyroclastic flows. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroclastic_flow]
Now a pyroclastic flow isn't, as it often looks in the news footage of the time, a mudslide. It is a superheated mass of steam and pulverized rock a couple thousand degrees in temperature, about the consistency of freshly mixed cement, and it's coming roaring down the mountain at you. The mudslide, an combination of snowmelt and volcanic ash, comes later.
Oh, the ash, can't forget about that. It's so thick, it turns day into night for cities downwind. The mushroom cloud reaches all the way to the upper air currents, so the ash gets deposited over 11 states. And the ash isn't like the stuff out of your fireplace, all fluffy and light. It is silica ash. Essentially, it is powdered volcanic glass, and there is a blizzard of it falling on you. It gets into your lungs and your eyes if your face isn't covered. It gets sucked into your car's air intakes and slowly grinds the engine to death. And of course, it smothers plant and animal life, and though it looks like gray snow, it won' ever melt. Years later, that drift will be there, in that sheltered corner of your house where the wind and rain couldn't wash it away.
Now, admittedly, this doesn't happen very often. If it did, we wouldn't live here. Most of the time, the earth gets a little irritated and tries to shake us off [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisqually_Earthquake] like a dog shaking off flies.
I'll make a deal with you Joe. If I ever go to Australia, I will go to the Reptile Park. If you ever come to the U.S., go the the Mt. St. Helens National Monument.
By the way, did you know that we actually have three small, extinct volcanoes within the city limits? At least, we think they are extinct. The haven't done anything. Recently.
Oh yeah, I forgot Hurricanes. Hurricanes, and by extension, tornadoes and flooding try and kill us as well.
Christ I hate it when a big spider is suddenly gone. One time a large (about 2.5 to 3 inches wide) wolf spider was hanging out in the room where I play video gamez. I told myself it wouldn't bother me if I didn't bother it and about 45 minuts later I looked up and it was gone. Oh well, the worst it will do is eat bugs right? Wrong! It bit me on the arch of my foot where it was resting on a stool (rotten little s.o.b.). I used to feel bad about the spider killing sprees I go on when they come in in the spring and fall, but large spiders are agressive, and even if ours are non-venomous, they hurt like hell. I mean, come on! it had to walk all the way accross the room then climb the stool, and bite foot. WHy would it even do that? If I see one, I kill it right away, if it dissapears, I hunt it down and kill it. With a stick or gloves. I hate them, and though I know they form a key part of the ecological balance, my home isn't part of it. They should stay out of it. It is by far the worst when one hides in your shoe or in your glove or (shudder) be or (double shudder) your shirt. I double check all cloths before I put them one, because I have been bitten 7 TIMES this way. Once I was going to get my gloves to kill one, and was bit by a smallish one hiding in the glove. Bullshit, did they PLAN that? Bottem line: spiders are fine outside, but if they are in my space (even if my current space happens to be outside) or home or shed, or any other place where they may bite me, I will smash them to bits. Because they WILL bite me if they get the chance.
No, For two reasons.Ultrajoe said:
One, if i wanted to see some spiders and creatures of that sort i would go in my backyard. Despite its size of approx. 20 metres squared it is the home to some ungodly things.
Two, I live too close to it. So i have been there about 10-20 times because school teachers were too lazy to think of any place original to take the class.
But, doesn't make those things any less cool..
Id would rather fight a bear ANY day than a funnel web spider. I can SEE a bear. You can't find spiders, they sneak. I'd rather have them all be the size of shelob from lord of the rings, then you could see it comeing and justify using a 10-gauge on it. (except for frodo, who had metal-gear-solid-henchman-syndrome, MGSHS, a condition that restricts your vision to a narrow cone, rendiering things above, below, and to the side invisible)
Spiders have already learned how to circle strafe. One ran up on my friend while we were sitting on the ground playing cards, he turned and stared at it and it stopped. He looked back after a minute and it crab walked around him. My friend was circle strafed by a house spider. It was hilarious.d7rth j0e said:
