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All of the above, YICK! SHRIEK! UGH!!!!! :::willies::::
Everyone must die but not everyone has lived
By Sheryl Ubelacker, The Canadian Press
For anyone who suffers from arachnophobia, it might be advisable to read no further.
That's because this is a story about a spider - a very BIG spider.
Researchers have discovered an entirely new species of arachnid, and its gargantuan female members represent the largest of its family ever found.
Dubbed Nephila komaci, this sucker has a tip-to-tip leg span of about 12 centimetres, including a body almost four centimetres wide. To get an idea how big that is, imagine the size of a man's hand or a small saucer.
"They look like they're all legs ... They live in webs, right, so they're spindly, relatively delicate spiders," said Jonathan Coddington, an arachnologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, one of the scientists who identified the new species.
"If you were standing there, you wouldn't say that. You would probably freak out. Most people do."
Like other giant golden orb weavers in its family, N. komaci spins a web that is equally impressive in size, measuring more than a metre in diameter.
"The webs are so strong that you bounce off," Coddington said Tuesday. "It's not a diaphanous experience."
He said the researchers aren't sure why the females grow so big (at one-fifth their size, the male of the species is positively puny). But he suggested that the bigger the spider, the more eggs it can lay in its lifetime, so size may confer an evolutionary advantage.
"They've probably outgrown most of their predators," Coddington said. Hummingbirds, which are known for plucking spiders off their webs while on the wing, "are too small to nail these guys. Bats could, too, but bats couldn't take something like this."
In fact, with this behemoth of a spider, the traditional hunter has become the hunted, as it were. N. komaci would have no problem chowing down on any bird, bat or lizard unfortunate enough to get ensnared in its web, although its usual diet would run more to flies, bees and grasshoppers, he said.
The females also aren't choosy about picking off the relatively dwarf-sized males of their own kind - if they're not in the mood to mate, or even after copulation, noted Coddington.
"When you watch male spiders court female orb weavers, they are very careful about how they do it. And they almost always have sort of an escape mechanism - which they not infrequently have to use."
While all Nephila species are poisonous - immobilizing their prey with a stab of venom and cocooning them in silk for later dining - the spiders are not harmful to humans, said co-discoverer Matjaz Kuntner, an arachnologist and evolutionary biologist at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
The spider's pincer-like jaws "are big enough and powerful enough to pierce the skin," he said from his home in Ljublnana, Slovenia. "But they would never really harm a human being, just because. It's only if you provoke them."
Still, N. komaci isn't the world's biggest spider. That dubious honour goes to the Goliath Birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), a South American tarantula that can have a 30-centimetre leg span and 2.5-centimetre-long fangs.
However, Kuntner called the discovery of the new orb-weaver species, reported in this week's issue of the scientific journal PLoS One, "very exciting."
"It was surprising to find a giant female Nephila from South Africa in the collection of the Plant Protection Research Institute in Pretoria, South Africa, that did not match any described species," said Kuntner, who first examined the specimen in 2000.
Kuntner, Coddington and colleagues launched several expeditions to South Africa to find the species in the wild, but all were unsuccessful, suggesting that the specimen represented a hybrid or perhaps an extinct species.
Then a few years ago, a South African colleague found a male and two females in Tembe Elephant Park, and it became clear scientists were seeing a valid new species. The team named the arachnid after Andrej Komac, Kuntner's close friend who had died in an accident.
Despite their hefty size, Kuntner said the leggy spider may be endangered because the habitat it appears to favour - tracts of sand forest - is under threat.
"It's just a good example of a non-vertebrate that needs immediate protection in terms of habitat protection," said the spider enthusiast, who has twice gone to the South African park to find live specimens of Nephila komaci and failed to turn up even one.
"It's either that their abundance is so low, which is probably the case, or they're confined to really, really small pockets," said Kuntner, suggesting they may spin their webs high in the forest canopy instead of in the lower vegetation "where we usually look."
"So until we get a better understanding by finding new populations that are viable and are there, we will simply not know."
A rolled up paper isnt going to handle that thing maybe a hollowpoint 22?
Very cool!
Why did I look? Good god, look at the size of that bloody thing! Run Becky Run!
I'm glad I didn't see this before I went to bed last night.
Light it on fire!
:::runs out of room shrieking:::::::::::::::
Everyone must die but not everyone has lived
Poor spiders so misunderstood maybe we could import them to eat the emerald assh bores?
I need a better picture to be fully scared. I have terrible arachnophobia. Some of the spiders in that other spider thread or horrifying.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
My wife is arachnophobic big time. She'll call me at work and say "I can't go into the bathroom, there is a gigantic spider in there. You need to kill it when you get home" So I'll go home prepared to do battle and go into the bathroom and there on the wall is this little speck. I'll say "I have to kill that? Look at the little guy, can't we just let him go?". It is an insanity I've learned to live with.
Oh yeah, that is one big effing spider
Any spider that can take down a bird needs to be stomped. Let me just find my Goliath Birdeating boots...
Anybody else feel a weird tickle at the back of their neck??? Or is it just me???
Can't we just export whatever it is you're talking about?
::FREAK::
::OUT::
My husband always lets them go outside & I'm like hellllooooo he'll just come right back in!!!!!!!!!
YES!!! I could not possible agree more!
No...it's more like a lump...down in my throat.
We have big trees in the yard where spiders love to live. I left my car parked in the middle of the walkway b/c I was unloading groceries. The sun roof was open. When I got back in the car to move it I looked up at the trees & got a very sick feeling in my tummy. I could not even imagine what evil lurked in between my seats!!!!!
I don't care how big or small it is, whether it's endangered or not. If its a spider it needs killing. I am absolutely shit scared of them, b/f has to kill them. I once slept on his multi-gym in the spare room because there was a spider downstairs and a spider in the bedroom.
::running out of room screaming again:::
Everyone must die but not everyone has lived
I'm getting a kick out of looking at this thread w/ my 4 year old. She commented that the spider needed to eat the cat she saw as someone's siggy pic
amokylooiuhddssttrews
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsvGs...feature=colike
My own, personal, Dexter...
This is a thing of beauty.
Noooo, no no...noooo, no it's not. I'm sorry, I tried! But noooo, no it's not. Notnotnot. Not. Definitely not.
When I was at my parent's house this summer my nephew and I powerwashed their house of which 2 sides were covered in webs and these huge brown spiders. The webs were super sticky and I couldn't believe the size of the spiders. We tried to collect them all and take them to the ditch before we washed and I looked down and they were all coming right back to the house. It was a bit creepy.
That sounds like a Stephen King story.
This morning I opened my shower curtain to find a little brown spider hanging out on the tile. It must've traveled the grout path around the tiles to get halfway up the wall. I thought maybe it was a brown recluse, but it looked more shiny than furry, with a bigger "butt" and a very pronounced white pattern on it. Kind of looked like a violin, like a recluse. But now that I'm looking at pictures of brown recluses, it definitely wasn't one. Phew. I caught it in a plastic cup and let it outside. If they are bigger, I usually kill them because I'm too scared to try and herd them into a cup because I'm afraid they'll be able to climb up and out and get me.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
there's a saying, that you are never more than 3 feet away from a spider. I believe I was a bit closer to this one, than that.
The pest control people that check for termites said we have a brown recluse infestation under the house but that they shouldn't bother us.
Why oh why do I click on this thread?