I’m quite proud of myself that I’ve developed a humane process to transport enormous wolf spiders from my apartment outside despite how fearsome they are!
I have, too! I scream for Tom and he comes and gets it. Except we have monster tarantulas and he just picks them up and calmly caries them away. (shudder)
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I probably wouldn’t be so cool with an actual tarantula (I know they can be tamed pets) but a wolf is probably the closest I’ll get.
My technique involves knocking it into a plastic soda-fountain cup and nesting a second cup in it - these have a half inch of space when stacked to ensure she’s not crushed (but oh you can tell how strong those spiders are because you can feel them trying to bash their way out from inside the cups as you carry them) then I can shake her out on some leaves near the trees next to my apartment.
I have a chilly peace treaty with the house centipede.
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Honestly, I don’t think I want to know what 8-legged things are living in the dark corners of my room I don’t venture into. Though, now that I think about it, it’s been a while since I’ve felt a mouse climb over me, and we’ve had a pretty resilient infestation since the jerks from animal control rounded up all the stray cats in the trailer park a couple years back.
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In Sydney, I have to throw out a huntsman spider at least every month. No matter how harmless they are, they’re too big and obvious for you to feel like you can go to sleep with one just sitting naked on the white wall or ceiling.
I have a transparent plastic cup and card combo that I use to catch them. The trouble is they’re incredibly skittish (they’re described as ‘shy and retiring’) so just approaching one can cause it to speed away, and then you’ve lost it, which is maddening.
I tried to find a video of the spider and this kind of thing to share here, but after twenty minutes of research I couldn’t find a sufficiently accurate and non-hyperbolic video. The spider is consistently described as the GIANT huntsman spider. Ninety percent of the videos show overhyped people freaking out, with captions like ‘Go to Australia, they said…’ So, I’ve got nothing. Watch such videos with a grain of salt for both presentation and visual scale.
-Wade
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That’s a lot of research to show some semi-random people on the internet a spider video! We non-Australians appreciate the effort, even if it was ultimately futile.
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I thought so, too. But that’s what I’m like.
-Wade
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Wait, Australia has noteworthy spiders that aren’t dangerous to humans? This is news to me.
Admittedly, I feel like Australia’s dangerous wildlife gets blown way out of proportion and that the average unarmed human with little to no survival training would be just as screwed if they had to contend with the wilds of North America as they would be in the Outback.
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Amen!
-Wade
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Australia apparently banned an episode of Peppa Pig (British kids’ show about animals doing children’s stuff like going to school) because they said “spiders are friends, you don’t need to kill them, they’re nice and eat the bugs” and they are not friends in Australia.
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But they have the #1 most deadly spider, snake, and jellyfish. Australia wins at poisonous things. Maybe people don’t run into those too often? But that is scary.
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I live at ground zero for the Sydney funnel web spider, but I am struggling to remember if I’ve ever seen one in a garden or even on a bushwalk. I’ve seen them in the museum.
They live in holes in the ground under decaying stuff. You’d mostly have to force your finger or toe into a finger or toe-sized hole under a pile of incredibly sus leaf litter to aggravate one, assuming you could find such a hole first and would do such a thing. That may be more a threat to inquisitive or stompy kids if the spiders are in your area. Kids in the bush are told not to go searching through weird old debris.
If you’re an adult and get envenomated (still onlly 10-15% chance per bite, I understand) you’ll have days to get to a hospital for a dose of the readily available antivenin. That’s why nobody has died from a funnel web bite for over forty years.
Redback spiders are a lot more common. I’ve found some in an empty pot in the front yard. As a kid, I picked up a curled piece of bark that had one in it without realising. I even found one under a cafe table inside Coolangatta airport (that’s a more typically Australian-sounding story of danger, I concede) but, again, once you’ve see them in a weird place, you just don’t start jabbing at them trying to piss them off. They’re not aggressive so they’ll just sit there.
I’m disturbed by the prospect of Irukandji jellyfish, but they’re not restricted to Australia. Typically you get a blanket warning like, ‘Just don’t swim in these tropical waters at this time of the year.’ Which is easily heeded.
Crocodiles – don’t go to the Northern Territory and turn your back on any water at certain times of the year.
Sharks – well, they attack more people than anything else I’ve listed here, and kill a few of them, but still not many.
Heed my boring advice if you want to live.
-Wade
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In Normandy, we have many varieties of Tegenaria (domestica, sivestris, gigantea…), a large spider named for the extensive webs they weave (Tegenarius means weaver in Latin). Quite intimidating for a French man unfamiliar with the Australian bush, it is a harmless creature that I have come to appreciate over the years due to its role in drastically controlling mosquito populations.
When one of them enters my home, I therefore follow a coherent, respectful, rational, and above all, courageous procedure: my wife relocates it to the garden (after all, spiders aren’t insects, so this doesn’t contradict what I previously said).
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Australia is the one place I always think I’d like to visit, but the fact that every thing seems like it has a way to kill you or is just enormous and scary… Ooh, beautiful butterfly! I’m one with nature–OMIGOD DEADLY VENOM keeps me from booking a flight. I’m sure most of it is hyperbole…
But the world’s deadliest jellyfish that is the size of a fingernail so it can slip through the finest protective nets and the neurotoxin kills you inside of a minute where you can’t even get out of the water quick enough to tell anyone there’s a problem… 
Clearly, New Zealand is God’s Own Country because Australia is God’s Septic Tank. XD
Yeah, I wouldn’t want to have to deal with a Sydney funnel web infestation with bare hands, but I also wouldn’t want to deal with a black widow infestation with bare hands and they’re far lower on the list of spider bites to be worried about. My state is also home to half of the top 10 venomous snakes in the US, but the only snakes I’ve ever gotten within striking range of have been a couple of captive boa constrictors. Cassowaries are scary SOBs and the Australian military lost a war to Emus, but I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of an angry bird with less formidable pedigree. Heck, the animals at the top of my list of animals to be concerned about being attacked by them are actually poorly trained pet dogs(and I’m actually more concerned about small breeds )and feral cats, most other things I’m not likely to encounter as long as I stick to suburbia and risk can be mostly eliminated by deploying common sense protective measures when venturing into human spaces people tend to be lax about maintaining and become oasis’s for wildlife we’ve driven out of their natural habitat, and once you pass the “potentially deadly” threshold, the difference between “barely deadly” and “most deadly in the world” is mostly academic, especially when you’re ranking things by potency of venom or sharpness of claws or bite strength rather than actual count of fatalities(by that measure, Mosquitos are the deadliest, mostly through transmission of disease in parts of the world without modern medicine). And yeah, with modern anti-venom, unless you’re stranded in the middle of the wilderness with no means of contacting civilization and no transportation other than your own two feet or are allergic to the venom and/or its anti-venom, most venomous bites are more unpleasant than actually life threatening.
Plus, North America has bears, Australia doesn’t, and I understand in some places, Bears won’t hesitate to venture into human settlements and go dumpster diving for any edible scraps we throw out.
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