What kind of shit is this?

[MJB]

Your culprit is the hand sized house spider.................

I used to kill them on sight, but this summer I chose to leave all but the largest of the bunch alone.........The result? Not a single cockroach all summer!

Still unnerving to see them scoot down your wall at flank speed though................ hock:

[Rascal]

No spider, please ...................... I can't sleep anymore in my apartment .......

[ImaniOU]

Rascal...I'd rather have spiders than roaches...especially since the former eats the latter. It would take a nice-sized one to go through one of the B.A.R.s (my personal acronym for Big-Ass Roaches). I love my spider story from about a year and a half ago. I was photocopying something when I heard a scuttling sound. I looked up from the machine and saw a spider with a body the size of my palm on a wall less than 3 feet from me. In other words, I heard the spider before I saw it. Hope you sleep well, Rascal. ;-)

[sandman]

I looked up from the machine and saw a spider with a body the size of my palm on a wall less than 3 feet from me.

Please tell me you mean that its leg-span was the size of your palm. hock: A body the size of your palm would make it much, much larger than world's biggest bird-eating spiders!

[Big Fluffy Matthew]

I looked up from the machine and saw a spider with a body the size of my palm on a wall less than 3 feet from me.

Please tell me you mean that its leg-span was the size of your palm. hock: A body the size of your palm would make it much, much larger than world's biggest bird-eating spiders!

Well, Rascal has one living under his bed, just waiting for the right time to grab him by the ankles and keep him in a big cocoon under the bed being slowly digested alive...

[sandman]

I looked up from the machine and saw a spider with a body the size of my palm on a wall less than 3 feet from me.

Please tell me you mean that its leg-span was the size of your palm. hock: A body the size of your palm would make it much, much larger than world's biggest bird-eating spiders!

Well, Rascal has one living under his bed, just waiting for the right time to grab him by the ankles and keep him in a big cocoon under the bed being slowly digested alive...

Or if not that, it'll certainly be looking for its favourite nursery site -- the inside of the human ear. Better wear ear plugs while you're asleep, Rascal, or in a few weeks you'll begin to experience a strange sensation deep inside you ear, followed by more and more excruciating pain until finally the babies have gnawed through your eardrum and can emerge in their hundreds from your ear. Of course, that won't include the ones that have gnawed in the other direction. Soft German brain tissue is very nourishing and the babies will be able to achieve quite a considerable size before they need live prey and burrow out of your head through your eye-sockets.








Sleep tight, don't let the bugs .... hmmm, probably a bit late for that particular piece of advice.

[Rascal]

I guess I need to get my apartment desinfected and my ears cleaned now ....

[Anonymous]

Geez, that's why I've gone deaf. Spiders in my ear ....

Anyhow, the ones I've killed had fangs about 7mm long and 8 eyes.

The hair on their legs was longer than my body hair.

I've heard they can jump 3 feet straight up ... or was this the wolf spider...hmmm

BTW, they don't attack humans ... yet.
And...they ran like hell as they spotted me ... but maybe that's because I'm not the prettiest man on earth.

Oyeah, it's the legs that are palm sized, so don't be scared.

I've heard that they sometimes hunt in packs???? hock:

[Mark Nagel]

I'm pretty sure that the huge hairy spiders commonly seen in Taiwan are closely related to the "Common Huntsman Spiders" of Australia. Here's a picture of a Common Huntsman Spider:



This website says that Huntsman Spiders are only in Australia, but the huge hairy spiders in Taiwan look almost exactly like the Common Huntsman Spiders of Australia, so they are probably closely related.

[sandman]

The ones I find around my place look pretty much exactly like this

But there's no way I've ever seen one 15cm across -- maybe half that.
They do have massive jaws, though. I quite often find their empty casts and mandibles 3 or 4mm long are not uncommon. I get the heebie-jeebies by the way they scuttle around so fast but I never saw the point in killing them.