this is why i love australia

[Mike Mcdermid]

you have to hand it to a nation that asks its residents to be on the look out for one of the deadliest spiders on the planet

not only is the antidote running low we would like to catch more spiders to stock up ....begs the question how do you catch one? not get it slightly angry? then not get bitten?

I love the spider expert, "normally we would ask people to leave them alone"

Anti-Venom Running Low For Deadliest Spider - Yahoo! News UK

Balls of steel

Chance of anything remotely dangerous happening in the UK.............A possible sighting of a turd in a swimming pool

[devlin]

They are a fearsome spider. Especially knowing how dangerous they are. When I was a kid we used to pour anything flammable down their hole and when they ran out we'd light them up. I'm a little bit embarrassed by that and I won't bother trying to justify it. I remember one day, the big kid down the road caught about 5 or 6 of them put them in an ice cream container and took them to school on the bus. You can imagine how the school reacted to that. Twas funny as hell at the time.

Up here in Brisbane we get a variant apparently but it's not in the numbers we used to get down south in Sydney and I have never seen one up here. The park across the road where we lived when I was a kid, about 2 hours south of Sydney, would have a burrow every three feet in the spring. No running around with bare feet but other than that we didn't give it too much thought.

Brown and Tiger Snakes are my biggest concern as in summer they are in abundance on less traveled mtb tracks. I always walk with heavy feet in summer and carry a decent sized stick. Don't know what I'd do with it but it makes me feel safer.


Edit: Just looked it up. We have SEVEN species here in Brisbane and they are all found in the areas where all the local mtb tracks are. Still haven't seen one though.