The Sydney Funnel-web is one of the world's deadliest spiders. They're known to be common in suburbs like ours. Until recently people would frequently die after an encounter in their garden or inside the house even (they come wandering in, looking for mates). Now there's an antivenene, so you get yourself to hospital quick smart and you're OK. Everyone has a spider story and most people think they can recognise them.
Until this week we hadn't come across any. Then along came two suspects in quick succession. Black and armour-plated, like I'd been told they were. One particularly menacing looking fellow was stationary on the wall outside the front door. The other was smaller, with more rounded abdomen, and sitting within the very funnel-shaped web under the eaves.
So I euthanased them with fly spray (didn't work very quickly, so I finished the job with boiling water), got a book, and set about formally identifying the bodies. It seems they're often confused with black house spiders and with trapdoor spiders, and there are 30 species of funnel-webs which are all hard to tell apart. The females are bigger than the males (as with these other species too) and have the rounder abdomens, and they can all look quite different before and after shedding their skins. So identification isn't so simple after all.
The book, like the websites we consulted, can't seem to organise itself with a consistent format of male/female/web pictures for each spider, but after due consideration I'm leaning to the view that the big one was a male trapdoor spider, and the smaller one a female black house spider. But I've got my specimens. I'll wave them under the noses of anyone who looks like they'll know.
N
No comments:
Post a Comment