[Bakegaku]

pfft... compared to the possoms here, the picture Mike posted is a cute little house pets.  Ours just look like giant rats with bearing teeth.  I'm sure yours are just as viscious, though.

I do believe one species of sun spider, or windscorpion as we call the buggers here, has been found to have some sort of primitive venom or digestive enzyme glands that function to cause tissue damage, but it is not particularly toxic to man, still, I wouldn't fancy a nip in the nether regions by one of those oversised, ambulatory sets of gnashers

yeah, that was in the Wikipedia article.  But of course their bite looks like it may be pretty nasty... and those things would freak me out no matter how harmless they actually were!  

Some bird populations would decline a great deal if the mosquitoes (food source) were to disappear.

hmmm.... worth it!

I agree.  I wouldn't mind them if they didn't make such a high pitch buzzing sounds, and they stayed away from your ears.  Also, of all the blood-thinning saliva they could have, they HAD to pick the itchy one.    

some of ours have Ross River Virus!!

Yeah... they are horrible disease carriers.  In my area Eastern Equine Encephalitus (EEE or Triple E) and West Nile virus are a problem .

[jdurg]

Some of the spiders I've seen would make me think that 7mm Magnum Load is required to exterminate them.  

[constant thinker]

I would think that after the 100's of years that us and mosquitos have been around that we (humans) could possibly have evolved so the mosquitos would not itch. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO the little buggers are still itchy and annoying.

[mike]

pfft... compared to the possoms here, the picture Mike posted is a cute little house pets.  Ours just look like giant rats with bearing teeth.  I'm sure yours are just as viscious, though.

yes they do look rather cute, especially the babies. There are a few childrens books written about them etc because they do actually look quite nice animals.

We get white-tail spiders here too (not sure if anyone out there can tell me their real name). They have caused some serious wounds with their flesh eating venom. This mainly happens to the elderly. I have been bitten twice and both times just had a rather large welt/blister. Other people have had to have limbs amputated etc, ouch!

Now I would have to say that jelly-fish sting has been my most painful "bite" from an animal so far, owee!

Oh does anyone else get those great big brown spiders (we call them huntsman or wolf spiders) in their house. They are everywhere here, they are about 100mm - 120mm across (including legs, body is about 20mm -30mm) they make my skin crawl, they are not poisonous though and we just catch them and through them outside, lol.

[Borek]

Oh does anyone else get those great big brown spiders (we call them huntsman or wolf spiders) in their house. They are everywhere here, they are about 100mm - 120mm across (including legs, body is about 20mm -30mm) they make my skin crawl, they are not poisonous though and we just catch them and through them outside, lol.

Tegenaria atrica?

[mike]

Tegenaria atrica?

*shiver* they sure do make my skin crawl

Yes this looks like the one.


oh, here it is in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsman_spider

I didn't realise that huntsman was actually a real name for it

[constant thinker]

I've gotten wolf spiders. Or atleast some of there really close relatives. I saw one of those hanging from my ceiling while I was on the can. I just took a cup to catch (he was midair), I just broke his thread. Then I dumped him in the toilet and flushed.

The spider was pretty ugly and creepy. Your not alone mike.

[mike]

I went out to our letterbox to collect the mail this morning and there was a great big one sitting on the mail, I didn't even realise until I was halfway back to the house. I guess because they aren't really aggressive they just sit there until you brush them off.

The worst one was when I was driving, it was a hot day and I was wearing shorts. I kept brushing my leg because I felt a tickle, at one point I looked down and there was a massive huntsman spider crawling up my leg!! eeewwww. I had to pull over and throw it out of the car.

[pantone159]

On the subject of the particularly vicious creatures that inhabit Australia (not you mike  ), I just saw this article about a woman who got bit by a brown snake while she was watching TV inside.  

Its from the New York Times, so you might not be able to read it if you haven't registered.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Granny-Snake-Bite.html

[limpet chicken]

Hehe, you aussies can lay claim to the inlant taipan, tiger snake, box jellyfish, stonefish and a pretty delightful selection of the most venomous critters in general, but spider-wise you lot lose out

There was an article in a brit newspaper recently about some shopper who had an uninvited and certainly unwelcome guest in a bunch of bananas, a tiny spiderling that just happened to be a certain Phoneutria Fera, the brazilian wandering spider, dirty great big spiders with a characteristic red color to the front of the fangs, a really mean temper, and the most toxic venom of any spider, the person, I think it was a woman, can't remember for sure now, got nipped, and ended up in hospital, but survived, with treatment mainly due to the spider being recently hatched.

As I remember, they never did catch the spider either, which might well still be in their house

[Bakegaku]

I just saw this article about a woman who got bit by a brown snake while she was watching TV inside.

What kind of brown snake?  I saw on Steve Irwin's top 10 most venemous snakes that number 10 was the Norther Brown snake, number 2 was the common Brown snake.

Hehe, you aussies can lay claim to the inlant taipan, tiger snake, box jellyfish, stonefish and a pretty delightful selection of the most venomous critters in general

Yup... Taipan was number 3 and there were a number of different tiger snakes in that countdown.  I am a little unsure of his accuracy, though.  He said that the most venemous snake was the fear snake, while I believe it's some kind of sea snake.  

Don't forget about the cowry snails and nettles, either.

spider-wise you lot lose out

Well... I wouldn't say that.  Perhaps they don't have the Phoneutria Fera there but they still have the Sydney funnel web and red back spiders.  In fact some may argue that the Sydney funnel web is more dangerous because it's just as aggressive and injects lethal doses of venom in nearly all of its bites.  The wanderer, on the other hand, inflicts dry bites about one third the time and only small amounts of venom in another third.

Admittedly I used Wikipedia to help me on that one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneutria_fera

Similarly, in my area there was a case of a woman finding a black widow spider in a bag of grapes.  Luckily it didn't bite her.  

[mike]

hmmm, I'm starting to wonder how anyone survives a day in Australia

If you are after interesting animals how about the platypus? If you don't know what one is then you can google it to find out. It is a duck-billed, semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammal, oh and it is venomous too (well the male is, and not probably to humans). Cool!

There are brown snakes around where I live but I haven't seen one in my own yard or house, the only reptiles we get at home are the blue-tongue lizard, and some skinks and geckos. My wife hates borsn snakes because she grew up on a property where there were plenty of them around, lots of horrible stories..

limpet: the wandering story spider sounds awful, like one of those urban myths, is it for real? That would be so unlucky, kinda spoil your appetite for bananas for a while hey?

[pantone159]

The article didn't say what kind of brown snake.  I have a list of toxins that has the Inland taipan being fatal with c. 1 mg of venom, Australian tiger snake at 3 mg, and the Coral snake (lives here in Texas) also at 3 mg.  I don't know which exact species, though.

Texas also has a type of spider, Brown recluse, whose venom is flesh eating.  I don't think the spider is very scary looking, I don't even know what they look like, but I have heard some bites take a very long time to heal (i.e. years).

It's still hard to beat what you get if you try and go swimming in the northern part of Australia...  (Answer:  You get eaten by a 7 m Crocodilus porosus.)

[limpet chicken]

Apparently the necrotising effect of Loxoceles Reclusa (brown recluse, violin spider) bites bites aren't actually that common, although there are a few more, somewhat nastier species in the related Sicarius species, one desert species, S.Hahnii has been tossed around as one of the most deadly spiders, causing tissue necrosis and widespread systemic toxicity, and as of yet, no antivenom available, probably just as well it spends most of its time in the african deserts

Bakegaku, its not the cowries you want to worry about, but the cone shells, they hunt fish, using a tethered, modified tooth as a harpoon, and carry some pretty potent neurotoxins, the conotoxins, some, I think it might have been one of the alpha-conotoxins have been adapted into extremely potent painkillers that are active when injected into the spine, although nicotinic antagonists, they are on almost a vague similarity to epibatidine in that respect, although the latter is a frog toxin with nicotinic agonist effects.

The wandering spider species do apparently dry-bite in a fair amount of cases, but are really bad tempered sons of bitches, that like the fierce snake (inland taipan, oxyuranus scutellatus) quite often strike repeatedly once you piss them off, and in the case of the spider, that seems to include just about anything, up to and including being in the wrong place at the wrong time shopping for bananas

Some of those tropical nettles are dirty great big stinging trees, some fairly lethal Laportea and Urera species for instance, a few of them have reportedly been fatal, and quite a lot apparently hurt for several months after the sting, I had a bit of a nasty encounter with something of the ilk while on holiday in kusadasi, Turkey, decided to go out somewhere less inhabited, and brushed against a rather unusual looking nettle of some sort, with very compact, spherical green flower clusters, looked quite like say, and unripe and very undeveloped blackberry fruit in structure, covered with what I found out where some pretty potent stinging hairs, I made damn sure to watch out for the same plant in future, after several hours of throbbing pain in my hand and wrist, I also saw colonies of a species of rather mean looking ants, about 0.5-0.75 inch long, dark colored, and with the general appearance of the bull and/Ponerinidae family, the primitive ants such as Megaponera, and the bullet ant, supposed to have one of the most disabling insect stings going around, needless to say I didn't take the chance of getting close enough to get stung, as I didn't much care for the idea of having one or more limbs swell up like balloons or having an allergic reaction and becoming one giant talking hive-wheal

The platypus, at least, the male which has the toxic spur on the hind feet is quite definately venomous to humans, reputedly it digs its spurs in hard, and from my reading on the creatures, extremely painfully, and can cause paralysis, while not usually being lethal to humans, better than sitting on a stonefish, heh, but not something I find a particularly appealing way to spend a week or so

I looked up the wandering spider case again, and apparently it was a chef handling imported bananas who got bitten.

[jdurg]

Then we have the puffer fish with it's oh-so-infamous tetrodotoxin that does a good job of killing you if you happen to get a bit of it in you.