An Unexpected Bedroom Companion

So it is being 'girly' to have a concern for a spider this size above you on the ceiling? Call me girly. My reaction is usually to throw enviromental concern to the wind and spray the hell out of the room with pesticides and then sit outside for 24 hours.

Yikes! That reminds me of my general worry when I walk through a spider web; it's not that the web is gross, but I have no idea where the spider is.

My parents' home in Florida has a different species of Huntsman living in and around it. I've never had the pleasure, but apparently my brother and my mom have both had visitations while taking showers. My brother captured one to keep as a pet to try to break him of his extreme arachnophobia, but it didn't work.

I'm not even going to watch that - I'm a girly arachnophobe too. Sharing a house with a guy who kept (and shaved!) tarantulas didn't help either.

Bob

Dear lord... my question is, what kind of critters would you have to have running around your house to attract one of these things to hunt there?

We had huntsmen in the john at a field camp in Upper Burma. They came in after the generator shut off, and just hung around on the walls. The "Burma girls" had learned to live with them, but visiting grrlscientists were less trusting -- though they were only "peeping toms". In my view as an old "boy scientist", the cockroaches in the toilet were far more worrisome.

I'm definitely not arachnophobic, but that's over my limit.

On the other hand, I might prefer its company to whatever it eats. What does it eat?

Hard to tell for sure without a known reference for scale, but that does look like a rather large example of a huntsman. Of course, in Australia, they're one of the more innocuous spiders you're likely to run into. We also have Funnel Webs, Redbacks, Mouse Spiders and fiddlebacks (who are interlopers introduced fairly recently on the scale of things), all of which can give you a Very Bad DayTM.

I've expelled huntsmen from the house often - sometimes in bare hands if they're easy to reach. They're big, cause a visceral reaction and they're obvious (and also excitable). They're not dangerous though. What's dangerous is your cat catching a funnelweb and dumping it in your lap as a present, or reaching under debris in your garden shed and squeezing up against a redback.

Neither of these things have happened to me. Yet.

As long as it's not a mouse. I'm not a huge fan of spiders, but rodentia freak me out.

I'm not sure where I'd find a glass big enough to evict that. O.o