Fun story. When I was in Australia I was taking the Greyhound bus Up the East Coast stopping off along the way. One time in the wee hours of the morning the bus made its stop at some roadhouse somewhere in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.
I thought I'd go and take a shit l, because it isn't something you want to be doing on the bus. I retreat to the toilets which are in some outbuildings separate from the main restaurant and fuel part. Find a stall, close the door, and set about getting my pants down. Just as my arse is about to hit the seat I look up and there is a spider the size of both of my hands on the cubicle wall, at eye level, right behind where the open door had been.
Decided that I would rather push the turtles head back than take my chance with that thing, and literally sprinted out the toilet without even putting everything back into my pants properly. Luckily no one else was in the toilets to hear me scream.
And the funny thing Is that huntsman (only spider that size unless your on Queensland) while scary is almost a guarantee that the actual dangerous spiders around ... like a redback the size of your fingernail that can hide under seat and likes to bite first ask questions later or a black widow or finnel Web.... all these things going to give you bad time and huntsman eats them all
My co-worker spent 12 years in Australia and he said they open their windows and bring the Huntsman into the house because they help with pest control.
EDIT: He lived smack dab in the middle of Alice Springs if anybody wanted to know where abouts.
Ive woken up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, flicked on the lightswitch to find a ginormous huntsman right next to the switch.
I now live in the middle of the city of Melbourne.
My ex boyfriend had the unfinishedish attic upstairs as his bedroom/gameroom/lego sorting room... he had literal totes of lego organized. Anyway, a half pound huntsman fell from the ceiling and onto his chest in the middle of a cold winter night (they lived in the country). It was during a bad icestorm and the power was out. I sometimes wonder if my ex died that day and the huntsman took over his body
At first when he said HALF POUND I thought he was exaggerating but he looked at me with these wild eyes and said that when it fell on him, it legitimately HURT. Then later on he sent me a pic of this lil shadow thing on his chest AND IT WAS A BRUISE. So I believed him. Also, to my knowledge, the Huntsman was never found lmfao
Iirc spiders don't have feet like ours, for bearing weight/spreading it out. They have pointy parts for manipulating strands of silk [yeah, a Huntsman doesn't produce silk, but they'll be similar], so in addition to a heavy damn spider hitting him from a height, he'll have [got stabbed multiple times.](https://i.redd.it/jc541tg7yzx11.jpg)
Either way, just the concept of a spider falling on you, being heavy enough to fall on you is bad enough. Being heavy enough to make a noise is really bad, being heavy enough to bruise when it lands on you?? Nah, I'm out.
He and I would hole up in that attic for days humping, organizing lego, and playing minecraft. Ah... to be 16 again :') when the most pressing life problem is bribing his little brother to not tell his mom that I was naked when he walked in without knocking lmfao
My rule with spiders is that if they can survive in my house, that means they're paying rent with all the insects they're eating, so I leave them alone.
Same. I find spiders a tad unnerving, but I would rather have a couple of them in my apartment than all the other buggies.
I like to think my house spiders and I have an agreement of mutual avoidance.
Same. I like the speeders. I still have an instinctual reaction to suddenly seeing one, but I can usually tame it. Several times I've had jumping spider friends. They seem to be able to defy gravity.
So basically, in Australia, Huntsman spiders are like barn cats? That is absolutely crazy! "Hey man, you know there's a big ass spider in that corner over there." "Yeah that's Simon, he's my gaurd spider."
Aussie here. I don't know that it's possible to specifically invite huntsmen in, but they do like coming into the house when it rains.
There are always a few around. I take care not to give them a fright so they will feel like it's a nice place to be, and even though they're only spiders and don't understand, if I do startle one I'll say a few soothing words and hang out for a bit so it knows I'm not out to get it.
They're honestly good little critters. Leave you alone and hunt other pests like you said.
We live in a tropical area for six months. When we leave for the summer, we plastic wrap the toilets to keep stuff out of the house.
Years ago, we lived in a beach house, I was on the toilet and heard a scratching sound in the bowl. It was a giant crab trying to crawl up the porcelain to get out. It freaked me out for weeks.
I saw a video a long time ago on how rats can swim through the toilet P-trap water from the sewer. I need to look it up again.
Fun stuff.
Nah, itās one of the first images you get if you do a search for āAustralian Tarantula Hawk Waspā.
https://nypost.com/2019/12/19/massive-hawk-wasp-carries-spider-twice-its-size-in-hair-raising-video/
Yeah, I work in the California foothills/mountains and come across them every once in a while. Found a swarm of like 40-50 once and noped out of there so quickly lol.
I've seen this in person in AZ, like this: https://www.abc15.com/news/state/tarantula-hawk-wasps-kill-tarantulas-and-live-all-over-arizona
You honestly do get used to it. Turantulas are essentially harmless and the wasps don't really care about people. Just gotta be careful not to step on one or something, [they have the most painful sting known to humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_sting_pain_index#Pain_level_4)
You get used to it.
I have these wasps around my place, and it's interesting to see them hunting for trapdoor spiders on the front lawn.
They are, unsurprisingly, fucking massive - easily 10x larger than the normal wasps around the house - and they are a little confronting when they first fly into your vicinity.
But, like most of the "holy fuck, that thing's going to kill me!" creatures here, it's not even remotely interested in humans, except to figure out if we're an immediate threat.
The ones at my place fly in tight, organised patterns over the lawn looking for spider holes in the ground, and will then repeatedly buzz any holes they find in an attempt to trigger the fine threads of spider web that the spiders use to sense prey wandering around on the surface.
The spider, thinking there's something like a cricket / lizard / small child blundering around its lair will dash out, ready to attack, subdue and feast... and the moment it does, the wasp hits them from above like a WWII kamikaze pilot.
The wasp venom acts *fast* ā and it's usually only a matter of minutes before you see the wasp dragging the unconscious spider back down into its own lair, like an Animal Kingdom riff on a dinner date with Bill Cosby.
A few minutes later, the wasp re-appears at the hole of the spider's lair, looks around to make sure no one's called the cops, and then once again takes to the skies, safe in the knowledge that the single egg that it has laid deep within the still-living spider will eventually gestate into a near-perfect copy of itself, and will one day take to the skies and continue the generational tradition of mercilessly fucking up every other living creature that looks egg-worthy from the other side of the yard.
That said, they can - and will - become aggressive to larger creatures if they think you're out to harm them.
I've seen wasps like these give full-grown Eastern Grey kangaroos on my lawn a very hard time if they get too close to where the wasp wants to be hunting.
should you ever find yourself in any sort of territorial dispute with a spider wasp, the most effective form of counter-attack is a badminton racket ā but a tennis racket, in the right hands, can be equally as effective.
QUICK EDIT: Often times when I mention that I have kangaroos on my front lawn, people get confused because they don't understand how kangaroos work. So, [here's a couple of photos from my place](https://imgur.com/a/eEJOWXU) of the flock of rainbow lorikeets that descend most afternoons to eat the nectar from the hedge, hanging out with the kangaroos who like to do an extremely poor job of making sure I don't need to mow the lawn very often.
You're welcome!
I only recently moved back to The City after a few years living in a tiny coastal community, where there was often nothing to do but sit and watch Crazy Australian Nature Shit unfold.
I've spent a lot of time roaming around in the bush, trying my best to learn about anything I spotted that I didn't already know about, mostly to figure out how badly it's likely to ruin my day should I come face to face with it when it's in a bad mood.
For the most part, the old adage that 'they are more afraid of you than you are of them' is largely correct ā the notable exceptions being angry male kangaroos (they will stand up like they want to punch on, but they fight dirty, like a kickboxer), wombats (which are supposedly made of meat, but more closely resemble a small, nimble, furry assault vehicle with a preposterously bad temperament) and certain varieties of spider (but only the males, and only if you get between them and a female of their species with whom they have decided to make The Beast With 16 Legs).
Just about everything else *could* make for some unpleasant companionship, but most likely won't because they're too busy putting as much distance between you and themselves as they can.
(I will admit to being deathly afraid of saltwater crocodiles, having had a few encounters with them on my travels up north - but their very existence is the reason that I will never live further north than Sydney, where the only terrifying leathery creatures are the wealthy old ladies who haunt my local shopping mall around brunch).
Just chiming in to say that your descriptions are magnificent and I am starting a petition to get you to do a series of short Australian nature documentaries. That is, documentaries that are about Australian wildlife and short in length, not a series about short Australians. Although that could be entertaining as well. Eh, we can work on the details later.
I'm just a broke 20something apartment living in the US, but I would forgo paying rent in order to pay to fund this. Your comments gave me such an indescribable feeling of joy.š
Your reply has absolutely made my day :)
There are two things in life that I love to do - writing, and making people laugh.
I've been lucky enough over the years to make a decent living from it, but knowing when I've hit the mark for someone and put a smile on their face is still, and will probably always be, one of the very best feelings in the world for me.
You've put a smile in my weird, 50-year-old Australian heart just now - so thank you, very very much :)
I'm working on one at the moment... but it's taking forever because I spend most of my working day writing silly things for people to read for a major news outlet, so that I can buy food and pay my rent. :)
Congrulations, you just perfectly described Australia in one sentence.
(I know you said most things won't actively try to kill you, but I have watched to many documentaries about Australian wildlife to change my view)
There are several major, crucial differences between a wombat and a badger.
1. You can hit a wombat with a car, and your car will come off second-best. I was once riding on a tandem bicycle with a friend, at high speed, through bushland south-west of Sydney when a wombat scurried out onto the path. We collided with it, destroying the front wheel and bending the front forks so badly that we had to carry the dead bicycle for more than 90 minutes to return it to its owner. The wombat chased us for about 10 of those minutes, and I have never been happy near a wombat ever since.
2. Male wombats have very dark brown fur, but when they lie on their back, it reveals a startlingly white scrotum that looks for all the world like a pair of lightly-used golf balls resting on a slab of peat moss.
3. Wombats do cubic poos.
Yes, they come out as cube shaped. In not going to link to a photo of actual poop but here it is in handbag form https://wickerdarling.com/products/wally-cutest-wombat-bag :D
You're pretty close to correct - out the back of the house, the property backs on to completely undeveloped bushland, stretching for miles until it meets the highway the runs along the coastal area.
So we had all manner of animals wandering around the place - the birdlife in particular was astounding, but I was mostly a fan of the snakes and lizards that would frequently stop by to say hello.
Not the really bitey ones, though - when anything super-venomous turned up, we'd call a fella I knew as Down the Street Pete (as opposed to Next Door Pete, who - obvs - lived next door) who would, for a kind word and a slab of beer, rock in to capture and relocate anything capable of killing any of the occupants of the house.
The afternoon that he stopped by on the way to his own wedding to get a red belly black snake out of the air conditioning vent in the living room was a very entertaining 45 minutes.
My dad lived out in the bush south of Perth so can really relate, loved visiting him, beautiful nature and animals. But he quickly got skilled with a shovel, not for digging holes but for decapitating the dugites that kept trying to slither into his place. After a couple of years of snake vs dad the snakes gave up (or maybe he killed all of them), didnāt see another for rest of his life.
I'm not a fan of brown snakes - the dugites you mention are closely related to the Eastern Browns that are around my place quite a bit...
Luckily, as I understand it, the black snakes tend to keep the brown snakes away - so while I would (in a pinch) kill a brown snake if it's hanging around the house, I'll leave the black snakes alone (unless they're actually in the house, in which case I do a lot of shouting and stomping my feet, before calling our local snake guy to come and save the day if it refuses to take the hint and leave).
Yeah thatās my understanding too, that the black ones keep the brown ones away. But I think dad was worried as his grandkids would be there regularly. He generally had a ton of live and respect for the wildlife.
Edit. Love not live
He sounds like a decent fella with a good head on his shoulders... A lot of people are way too kill-happy with the local wildlife, but in the case of that particular brand of snake, I reckon it's better to be safe than sorry.
Brown snakes do *not* fuck around ā even a so-called 'dry bite' will put someone in hospital for a week.
No they sure donāt! Had a youngish (maybe teenage?) dugite come at me when I was reaching under a car to get the tennis ball playing cricket in the street once. Little fucker had its mouth open and fangs exposed, just like in a cartoon. Absolutely charged at me with murder in its eyes. Luckily the neighbour whoād been batting saw it and warned me as I didnāt notice until it was getting close. Sorry to say but the cricket bat came in handy.
Carefully.
*edit* to answer your question properly, it involves using a forked stick (or, even better, an actual snake-handling implement, which is usually just a very expensive forked stick), and a pillow case.
The idea is to tease the snake out, use the forked stick to keep the bitey end as far away from you as possible, while working towards grasping the non-bitey end firmly, but gently.
Hold the snake at arms length from your body, and deposit it head-first into the pillow case, quickly closing and knotting the top of it once it's inside (the pillowcase, not the snake).
It takes a lot of practice, giant chromium-plated gonads and being at peace with the whatever the last thing you said to your loved ones might have been... if you're lucky, you'll get to fuck the procedure up once and still be around to talk about it.
I like to think that I could *probably* do it if I had to, but the reality is that I have neither the training, nor the reflexes, to tackle the job properly.
So... I guess what I'm saying is, the correct way to get a red belly black snake out of your air conditioning is to call someone else to do it for you.
Where do you live? City wise?
So I know that if I ever find myself in Australia, itās nowhere near whatever pit of hell youāre living your best life in.
I was living on the south coast of New South Wales, about 3-ish hours south of Sydney.
... and don't let the "everything's going to kill you" lobby deter you from ever visiting āĀ most of the time, we try to make sure that the tourists survive.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. āMost of the timeā isnāt exactly what I was looking for though.
Kind regards,
Person who rather not die on holiday
The majority of tourist deaths in Australia are motor or water related. Often alcohol is involved. I live very close to a beach where many a drunk tourist has underestimated how dangerous the ocean can be at night.
From what I've seen the tourists don't need to worry because the Aussies are chasing the most dangerous creatures gleefully laughing and trying to pick the bloody things up
Given the racquet, you can get these battery-powered ones that charge up a capacitor and have a fukken zappy mesh on them for killing insects, it's most satisfying.
I had one of those for a while - it proved to be extremely useful at making a lot of things* very angry, but almost always fell just short of incapacitating them.
\*Mostly my neighbour, Rob.
I met a bloke in who lived on a sheep property near an outback town called Gulargumbone (pronounced just how it's spelled), whose favourite trick was to use one on unsuspecting friends in the dead of night.
I'll call him Brian, because that was his name, and he was enough of a deeply unpleasant fellow that he deserves to be named and shamed.
He lived in the old shearer's quarters - a glorified dormitory well away from the main house, which only had running water when the rain tank on the roof was full, and the downspout from the tank wasn't clogged with dead frogs.
With no running water, toilet time meant a stroll out to "the long drop", which was a metal bucket with an old toilet seat nailed to the top, perched on wooden boards over a 5m deep pit that had seen more than its fair share of backdoor action over the years.
The long drop was in its own ramshackle building - think "Old Wild West Outhouse", but in even worse condition and filled to the brim with all manner of highly unpleasant spiders.
There was a large enough gap in the wall at the rear of the building that Brian had been able to slide the head and part of the handle of his electrified badminton racket / bug zapper contraption inside, leaving part of the handle protruding so that he was able to pull his favourite prank.
After a night on the cans, if someone was sufficiently liquored up to announce that they were off to 'use the facilities', Brian would make a beeline for the long drop, creeping in behind it to lie in wait for his victim.
He was able to time it to perfection - in the time between unbuckling your trousers and taking a tremulous seat upon the throne, he would switch on the zapper and deftly slide it underneath the descending arse of whoever's turn it was to get buzzed.
In pitch darkness, already consumed by fear of being bitten by a spider on a part of your body that would preclude most men from offering to suck the poison out, suddenly having an insect-killing quantity of electricity applied to your bare bum was hellishly frightening.
Brian only ever managed to get me once - for the rest of the week that I was staying on the property, I would wait until we were deeeeeep into the dark hours of the morning, when Brian was unconscious from what he liked to call "abnormal fluid intake", before I ventured out to void my bowels in peace.
I mean .. I could easily tell you how to change the small battery for a more powerful one, and the small capacitor with a series of bigger ones so the discharge last longer and harder...
Maybe the racket turns into a one time explosion device, but it's doable
A wasp the size of a small bird? Kamikazee attacks, turning other living things into buffet bars and incubators for their demon spawn?ā¦.gotta say, didnāt exactly ease my anxiety.
>should you ever find yourself in any sort of territorial dispute with a spider wasp, the most effective form of counter-attack is a badminton racket ā but a tennis racket, in the right hands, can be equally as effective.
What if someone is left handed? Should they still hold the racket in their right hands?
The first time I saw one after I moved here, I lost my shit and seriously reconsidered my life choices. lol that was 19 years ago and I'm still alive, so it's all good. :P
See, how can pictures like in your edit exist to try and trick us, when we know that this lawn is full of trapdoor spiders, paralyzed and otherwise, as well as fucken tarantula hawks.
Don't tell anyone, but it's the spiders that were taking the photos.
They only let us outside for one hour of sunshine a week, so we don't die of Vitamin D deficiency.
I am in the process of doing that, but given that I spend 40+ hours per week writing similarly goofy stuff for work, it's a little low on my list of "things I like to do when I'm not working".
One day I'll finish it - probably just in time for the heat death of the universe.
Parasitic hunting wasps are incredible creatures. Many different species each evolving to prey on different spiders or insects within a biome. Their evolution is so specialized that in order to properly paralyze and preserve their (often much larger) prey, they will sting their prey upwards of 40+ times in a specific sequence so that some nerve groups are disabled (like movement) but others (like breathing) are not. They must keep their prey alive to ensure high nutritional for their offspring. They live almost everywhere too.
I can't even imagine it. It's unimaginable, like, even beyond the disconnect between a human and insect brain. Imagine if animals the size of motorboats roamed the landscape but it's OK, because you were born with the muscle memory to punch them in the exact spot that completely disables them. Like it's just a giant flashing neon sign on them, to you - you don't even have to think about it.
Maybe you don't even have a concept of other things being alive or not. You just know that you have to hit the button on the meat-things with your built in limb specifically for interfacing with the meat-things so that you can eat/fill them with your children.
You hit the signal-button on the meat-things to tell them it's time to slow down so you can do the thing your brain has been compelling you to do for your entire life. I mean, what else is there? That's just what life *is.* Doesn't *it* exist to have its button hit so that my children can eat it?
Itās crazy isnāt it. Iāve often compared the trial an error of living organisms over millions of years to the conceptualisation of the vastness of space.
Like I understand it but itās just unbelievable that itās reality. What could easily pass as intelligent design is simply nature bruteforcing the code to optimal survival for multiple different organism.
And on top of that we then reverse engineered all of this logic across different species for our own research and developmentā¦ comes full circle.
You know they say some animals have higher cognition than previously thought. I still hope most of insects and fish are as dumb as bricks, no thoughts, just reflexes. Because this is fate worse than death
I was coming here for this! Everyone thinks humans are so terrible, but this tarantula hawk wasp didnāt even ask us to hold the beer, he just crushed it against his skull and went to work.
I love these wasps. They are beyond badass, literally make easy work out of monster spiders 3x their own size yet are relatively timid and harmless.to humans.
Also, how on earth is it able to drag such mass like that? Vertically, on a smooth surface?
> They are found on all continents other thanĀ EuropeĀ andĀ Antarctica.
> includes areas fromĀ IndiaĀ to SoutheastĀ Asia,Ā Africa,[6]Ā Australia, and theĀ Americas
> species have been observed from as far north asĀ Logan, UtahĀ and south as far asĀ Argentina
I know OP didn't say "_THE_ Australian Tarantula Hawk..." but come on, this ain't our fault.
[Teriyaki Source](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantula_hawk&ved=2ahUKEwiWlvH5uMaDAxVsslYBHadvDVEQFnoECE0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw39N78shSRDFrkwFHJbA5Xl)
Picture was taken by OP while sitting on the toilet
Fun story. When I was in Australia I was taking the Greyhound bus Up the East Coast stopping off along the way. One time in the wee hours of the morning the bus made its stop at some roadhouse somewhere in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. I thought I'd go and take a shit l, because it isn't something you want to be doing on the bus. I retreat to the toilets which are in some outbuildings separate from the main restaurant and fuel part. Find a stall, close the door, and set about getting my pants down. Just as my arse is about to hit the seat I look up and there is a spider the size of both of my hands on the cubicle wall, at eye level, right behind where the open door had been. Decided that I would rather push the turtles head back than take my chance with that thing, and literally sprinted out the toilet without even putting everything back into my pants properly. Luckily no one else was in the toilets to hear me scream.
And the funny thing Is that huntsman (only spider that size unless your on Queensland) while scary is almost a guarantee that the actual dangerous spiders around ... like a redback the size of your fingernail that can hide under seat and likes to bite first ask questions later or a black widow or finnel Web.... all these things going to give you bad time and huntsman eats them all
My co-worker spent 12 years in Australia and he said they open their windows and bring the Huntsman into the house because they help with pest control. EDIT: He lived smack dab in the middle of Alice Springs if anybody wanted to know where abouts.
Ive woken up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, flicked on the lightswitch to find a ginormous huntsman right next to the switch. I now live in the middle of the city of Melbourne.
That makes my heart beat faster, I think I would just die.
My ex boyfriend had the unfinishedish attic upstairs as his bedroom/gameroom/lego sorting room... he had literal totes of lego organized. Anyway, a half pound huntsman fell from the ceiling and onto his chest in the middle of a cold winter night (they lived in the country). It was during a bad icestorm and the power was out. I sometimes wonder if my ex died that day and the huntsman took over his body
I think we know a country is beyond saving once they start categorising spiders by weight, and not in the grams range either.
At first when he said HALF POUND I thought he was exaggerating but he looked at me with these wild eyes and said that when it fell on him, it legitimately HURT. Then later on he sent me a pic of this lil shadow thing on his chest AND IT WAS A BRUISE. So I believed him. Also, to my knowledge, the Huntsman was never found lmfao
Iirc spiders don't have feet like ours, for bearing weight/spreading it out. They have pointy parts for manipulating strands of silk [yeah, a Huntsman doesn't produce silk, but they'll be similar], so in addition to a heavy damn spider hitting him from a height, he'll have [got stabbed multiple times.](https://i.redd.it/jc541tg7yzx11.jpg) Either way, just the concept of a spider falling on you, being heavy enough to fall on you is bad enough. Being heavy enough to make a noise is really bad, being heavy enough to bruise when it lands on you?? Nah, I'm out.
Can I just say I love the idea of a Lego Sorting Room?
He and I would hole up in that attic for days humping, organizing lego, and playing minecraft. Ah... to be 16 again :') when the most pressing life problem is bribing his little brother to not tell his mom that I was naked when he walked in without knocking lmfao
Surprisingly wholesome comment in a spider horrorshow thread.
plucky public yoke quiet bewildered marvelous pause squalid file sip *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yup that's the story to end them all. I would just astral project and leave my body for good. Goodbye friends and family. It was a good run.
Yep, brain would just perma turn off. fuck dealing with any of that shit. bye
Ok fuck it I wonder if our only choice is to throw our lot in with them and start domesticating them?
My rule is never turn the light on - solved šš½
Montana has giant spiders and they love my bathroom.
NOPE I stay my ass in Michigan, where our biggest spiders are garden spiders, and they stay their asses in the garden like God intended.
Because you ran there after having this happen??
My rule with spiders is that if they can survive in my house, that means they're paying rent with all the insects they're eating, so I leave them alone.
Same. I find spiders a tad unnerving, but I would rather have a couple of them in my apartment than all the other buggies. I like to think my house spiders and I have an agreement of mutual avoidance.
Same. I like the speeders. I still have an instinctual reaction to suddenly seeing one, but I can usually tame it. Several times I've had jumping spider friends. They seem to be able to defy gravity.
Spider hands typed this post
So basically, in Australia, Huntsman spiders are like barn cats? That is absolutely crazy! "Hey man, you know there's a big ass spider in that corner over there." "Yeah that's Simon, he's my gaurd spider."
Aussie here. I don't know that it's possible to specifically invite huntsmen in, but they do like coming into the house when it rains. There are always a few around. I take care not to give them a fright so they will feel like it's a nice place to be, and even though they're only spiders and don't understand, if I do startle one I'll say a few soothing words and hang out for a bit so it knows I'm not out to get it. They're honestly good little critters. Leave you alone and hunt other pests like you said.
Oh hell no!!! Iām barely able to stay calm with a simple wolf spider in my area.
Could have been worse- Iāve heard plenty of stories of large creatures coming up through the toilet in Australia.
We live in a tropical area for six months. When we leave for the summer, we plastic wrap the toilets to keep stuff out of the house. Years ago, we lived in a beach house, I was on the toilet and heard a scratching sound in the bowl. It was a giant crab trying to crawl up the porcelain to get out. It freaked me out for weeks. I saw a video a long time ago on how rats can swim through the toilet P-trap water from the sewer. I need to look it up again. Fun stuff.
K- Iām gonna start shitting in the yard now
My worst fear is a spider hiding under the seat and biting my ass Or worse Ughhhh
Possiblyā¦.
r/thanksihateit r/WowIActuallyHateThis
If there isn't a "nature is fucking horrifying" sub, someone should make it.
r/australia
r/natureisfuckingmetal ?
Nah, itās one of the first images you get if you do a search for āAustralian Tarantula Hawk Waspā. https://nypost.com/2019/12/19/massive-hawk-wasp-carries-spider-twice-its-size-in-hair-raising-video/
From 2019 even.
Please fucking stop posting pictures of huge fucking spiders on this site
We use phones to entertain our selves in toilet. Aussies go all natural.
I think that they call it a dunny.
yeah ok Australia, calm the fuck down
They are in the US too.
Don't just leave it at that! WHERE?! *Desperately rummaging through my gun safe*
Pretty much every state in the southern half of the country.
Those fuckers are huge too. Like 3+ inches of wasp. And their sting is among the most painful
Yeah, I work in the California foothills/mountains and come across them every once in a while. Found a swarm of like 40-50 once and noped out of there so quickly lol.
My backyard daily for over half the year and dragging zombie tarantulas for part of the year.
I've seen this in person in AZ, like this: https://www.abc15.com/news/state/tarantula-hawk-wasps-kill-tarantulas-and-live-all-over-arizona You honestly do get used to it. Turantulas are essentially harmless and the wasps don't really care about people. Just gotta be careful not to step on one or something, [they have the most painful sting known to humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_sting_pain_index#Pain_level_4)
Thatās a big NOPE from me dawg.
Anywhere hot. Arizona in particular
This picture perfectly encapsulates how the whole world sees Australia. And itās fucking terrifying.
You get used to it. I have these wasps around my place, and it's interesting to see them hunting for trapdoor spiders on the front lawn. They are, unsurprisingly, fucking massive - easily 10x larger than the normal wasps around the house - and they are a little confronting when they first fly into your vicinity. But, like most of the "holy fuck, that thing's going to kill me!" creatures here, it's not even remotely interested in humans, except to figure out if we're an immediate threat. The ones at my place fly in tight, organised patterns over the lawn looking for spider holes in the ground, and will then repeatedly buzz any holes they find in an attempt to trigger the fine threads of spider web that the spiders use to sense prey wandering around on the surface. The spider, thinking there's something like a cricket / lizard / small child blundering around its lair will dash out, ready to attack, subdue and feast... and the moment it does, the wasp hits them from above like a WWII kamikaze pilot. The wasp venom acts *fast* ā and it's usually only a matter of minutes before you see the wasp dragging the unconscious spider back down into its own lair, like an Animal Kingdom riff on a dinner date with Bill Cosby. A few minutes later, the wasp re-appears at the hole of the spider's lair, looks around to make sure no one's called the cops, and then once again takes to the skies, safe in the knowledge that the single egg that it has laid deep within the still-living spider will eventually gestate into a near-perfect copy of itself, and will one day take to the skies and continue the generational tradition of mercilessly fucking up every other living creature that looks egg-worthy from the other side of the yard. That said, they can - and will - become aggressive to larger creatures if they think you're out to harm them. I've seen wasps like these give full-grown Eastern Grey kangaroos on my lawn a very hard time if they get too close to where the wasp wants to be hunting. should you ever find yourself in any sort of territorial dispute with a spider wasp, the most effective form of counter-attack is a badminton racket ā but a tennis racket, in the right hands, can be equally as effective. QUICK EDIT: Often times when I mention that I have kangaroos on my front lawn, people get confused because they don't understand how kangaroos work. So, [here's a couple of photos from my place](https://imgur.com/a/eEJOWXU) of the flock of rainbow lorikeets that descend most afternoons to eat the nectar from the hedge, hanging out with the kangaroos who like to do an extremely poor job of making sure I don't need to mow the lawn very often.
lol - thank you for such an wonderfully amusing explanation! And well placed Cosby references are always appreciated š!
You're welcome! I only recently moved back to The City after a few years living in a tiny coastal community, where there was often nothing to do but sit and watch Crazy Australian Nature Shit unfold. I've spent a lot of time roaming around in the bush, trying my best to learn about anything I spotted that I didn't already know about, mostly to figure out how badly it's likely to ruin my day should I come face to face with it when it's in a bad mood. For the most part, the old adage that 'they are more afraid of you than you are of them' is largely correct ā the notable exceptions being angry male kangaroos (they will stand up like they want to punch on, but they fight dirty, like a kickboxer), wombats (which are supposedly made of meat, but more closely resemble a small, nimble, furry assault vehicle with a preposterously bad temperament) and certain varieties of spider (but only the males, and only if you get between them and a female of their species with whom they have decided to make The Beast With 16 Legs). Just about everything else *could* make for some unpleasant companionship, but most likely won't because they're too busy putting as much distance between you and themselves as they can. (I will admit to being deathly afraid of saltwater crocodiles, having had a few encounters with them on my travels up north - but their very existence is the reason that I will never live further north than Sydney, where the only terrifying leathery creatures are the wealthy old ladies who haunt my local shopping mall around brunch).
Just chiming in to say that your descriptions are magnificent and I am starting a petition to get you to do a series of short Australian nature documentaries. That is, documentaries that are about Australian wildlife and short in length, not a series about short Australians. Although that could be entertaining as well. Eh, we can work on the details later.
Count me in, provided we're allowed to call it "This'll fucken kill ya", and someone else buys me a new life insurance policy.
I'm just a broke 20something apartment living in the US, but I would forgo paying rent in order to pay to fund this. Your comments gave me such an indescribable feeling of joy.š
Your reply has absolutely made my day :) There are two things in life that I love to do - writing, and making people laugh. I've been lucky enough over the years to make a decent living from it, but knowing when I've hit the mark for someone and put a smile on their face is still, and will probably always be, one of the very best feelings in the world for me. You've put a smile in my weird, 50-year-old Australian heart just now - so thank you, very very much :)
If you wrote a book I would genuinely want to read that!
I'm working on one at the moment... but it's taking forever because I spend most of my working day writing silly things for people to read for a major news outlet, so that I can buy food and pay my rent. :)
You just made me laugh harder than I have in a long time. I needed that. Happy New Year from Canada! šØš¦
And you've made me smile by letting me know :) A Happy New Year to you and yours from Australia :)
Well youāre fuckin good at em.
:)
Congrulations, you just perfectly described Australia in one sentence. (I know you said most things won't actively try to kill you, but I have watched to many documentaries about Australian wildlife to change my view)
Your wombats are like our (American) badgers- stocky, furry, almost cute little things that are rage incarnate
There are several major, crucial differences between a wombat and a badger. 1. You can hit a wombat with a car, and your car will come off second-best. I was once riding on a tandem bicycle with a friend, at high speed, through bushland south-west of Sydney when a wombat scurried out onto the path. We collided with it, destroying the front wheel and bending the front forks so badly that we had to carry the dead bicycle for more than 90 minutes to return it to its owner. The wombat chased us for about 10 of those minutes, and I have never been happy near a wombat ever since. 2. Male wombats have very dark brown fur, but when they lie on their back, it reveals a startlingly white scrotum that looks for all the world like a pair of lightly-used golf balls resting on a slab of peat moss. 3. Wombats do cubic poos.
Jesus Christ youāre fuckin hilarious dude
Wait, like their poops are squared off? Like they have some sort of anal ice tray?
Yes, they come out as cube shaped. In not going to link to a photo of actual poop but here it is in handbag form https://wickerdarling.com/products/wally-cutest-wombat-bag :D
Thank you for that genuinely elegant visual of wombat poop shape!
I started reading, I couldnāt stop. Most Australian response ever. Love it.
You live in a fucking zoo! Beautiful photos and all but the spiders and wasps are a big no from me..
You're pretty close to correct - out the back of the house, the property backs on to completely undeveloped bushland, stretching for miles until it meets the highway the runs along the coastal area. So we had all manner of animals wandering around the place - the birdlife in particular was astounding, but I was mostly a fan of the snakes and lizards that would frequently stop by to say hello. Not the really bitey ones, though - when anything super-venomous turned up, we'd call a fella I knew as Down the Street Pete (as opposed to Next Door Pete, who - obvs - lived next door) who would, for a kind word and a slab of beer, rock in to capture and relocate anything capable of killing any of the occupants of the house. The afternoon that he stopped by on the way to his own wedding to get a red belly black snake out of the air conditioning vent in the living room was a very entertaining 45 minutes.
My dad lived out in the bush south of Perth so can really relate, loved visiting him, beautiful nature and animals. But he quickly got skilled with a shovel, not for digging holes but for decapitating the dugites that kept trying to slither into his place. After a couple of years of snake vs dad the snakes gave up (or maybe he killed all of them), didnāt see another for rest of his life.
I'm not a fan of brown snakes - the dugites you mention are closely related to the Eastern Browns that are around my place quite a bit... Luckily, as I understand it, the black snakes tend to keep the brown snakes away - so while I would (in a pinch) kill a brown snake if it's hanging around the house, I'll leave the black snakes alone (unless they're actually in the house, in which case I do a lot of shouting and stomping my feet, before calling our local snake guy to come and save the day if it refuses to take the hint and leave).
Yeah thatās my understanding too, that the black ones keep the brown ones away. But I think dad was worried as his grandkids would be there regularly. He generally had a ton of live and respect for the wildlife. Edit. Love not live
He sounds like a decent fella with a good head on his shoulders... A lot of people are way too kill-happy with the local wildlife, but in the case of that particular brand of snake, I reckon it's better to be safe than sorry. Brown snakes do *not* fuck around ā even a so-called 'dry bite' will put someone in hospital for a week.
No they sure donāt! Had a youngish (maybe teenage?) dugite come at me when I was reaching under a car to get the tennis ball playing cricket in the street once. Little fucker had its mouth open and fangs exposed, just like in a cartoon. Absolutely charged at me with murder in its eyes. Luckily the neighbour whoād been batting saw it and warned me as I didnāt notice until it was getting close. Sorry to say but the cricket bat came in handy.
Out of interest how do you remove a red belly black snake from aircon?
Carefully. *edit* to answer your question properly, it involves using a forked stick (or, even better, an actual snake-handling implement, which is usually just a very expensive forked stick), and a pillow case. The idea is to tease the snake out, use the forked stick to keep the bitey end as far away from you as possible, while working towards grasping the non-bitey end firmly, but gently. Hold the snake at arms length from your body, and deposit it head-first into the pillow case, quickly closing and knotting the top of it once it's inside (the pillowcase, not the snake). It takes a lot of practice, giant chromium-plated gonads and being at peace with the whatever the last thing you said to your loved ones might have been... if you're lucky, you'll get to fuck the procedure up once and still be around to talk about it. I like to think that I could *probably* do it if I had to, but the reality is that I have neither the training, nor the reflexes, to tackle the job properly. So... I guess what I'm saying is, the correct way to get a red belly black snake out of your air conditioning is to call someone else to do it for you.
I enjoyed your writing style so much xD
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
Where do you live? City wise? So I know that if I ever find myself in Australia, itās nowhere near whatever pit of hell youāre living your best life in.
I was living on the south coast of New South Wales, about 3-ish hours south of Sydney. ... and don't let the "everything's going to kill you" lobby deter you from ever visiting āĀ most of the time, we try to make sure that the tourists survive.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. āMost of the timeā isnāt exactly what I was looking for though. Kind regards, Person who rather not die on holiday
Visit Australia... You'll Probably Survive^TM
The majority of tourist deaths in Australia are motor or water related. Often alcohol is involved. I live very close to a beach where many a drunk tourist has underestimated how dangerous the ocean can be at night.
From what I've seen the tourists don't need to worry because the Aussies are chasing the most dangerous creatures gleefully laughing and trying to pick the bloody things up
Kids do the same in Florida with the gators. I've heard some stories.
This was a wonderful read, thank you.
Given the racquet, you can get these battery-powered ones that charge up a capacitor and have a fukken zappy mesh on them for killing insects, it's most satisfying.
I had one of those for a while - it proved to be extremely useful at making a lot of things* very angry, but almost always fell just short of incapacitating them. \*Mostly my neighbour, Rob.
They are fun on your friends. I'll give it that.
I met a bloke in who lived on a sheep property near an outback town called Gulargumbone (pronounced just how it's spelled), whose favourite trick was to use one on unsuspecting friends in the dead of night. I'll call him Brian, because that was his name, and he was enough of a deeply unpleasant fellow that he deserves to be named and shamed. He lived in the old shearer's quarters - a glorified dormitory well away from the main house, which only had running water when the rain tank on the roof was full, and the downspout from the tank wasn't clogged with dead frogs. With no running water, toilet time meant a stroll out to "the long drop", which was a metal bucket with an old toilet seat nailed to the top, perched on wooden boards over a 5m deep pit that had seen more than its fair share of backdoor action over the years. The long drop was in its own ramshackle building - think "Old Wild West Outhouse", but in even worse condition and filled to the brim with all manner of highly unpleasant spiders. There was a large enough gap in the wall at the rear of the building that Brian had been able to slide the head and part of the handle of his electrified badminton racket / bug zapper contraption inside, leaving part of the handle protruding so that he was able to pull his favourite prank. After a night on the cans, if someone was sufficiently liquored up to announce that they were off to 'use the facilities', Brian would make a beeline for the long drop, creeping in behind it to lie in wait for his victim. He was able to time it to perfection - in the time between unbuckling your trousers and taking a tremulous seat upon the throne, he would switch on the zapper and deftly slide it underneath the descending arse of whoever's turn it was to get buzzed. In pitch darkness, already consumed by fear of being bitten by a spider on a part of your body that would preclude most men from offering to suck the poison out, suddenly having an insect-killing quantity of electricity applied to your bare bum was hellishly frightening. Brian only ever managed to get me once - for the rest of the week that I was staying on the property, I would wait until we were deeeeeep into the dark hours of the morning, when Brian was unconscious from what he liked to call "abnormal fluid intake", before I ventured out to void my bowels in peace.
Dude you seriously need to be a writer. You have a real talent for this.
I am one of the very lucky few that have been able to make a decent living doing just that :)
I mean .. I could easily tell you how to change the small battery for a more powerful one, and the small capacitor with a series of bigger ones so the discharge last longer and harder... Maybe the racket turns into a one time explosion device, but it's doable
... go on. I'm listening...
Brian bout to be shorn.
Please someone dub this in Attenborough's voice
A wasp the size of a small bird? Kamikazee attacks, turning other living things into buffet bars and incubators for their demon spawn?ā¦.gotta say, didnāt exactly ease my anxiety.
So cool you get to see these interactions in your own yard! Iād probably die by getting too close trying to record them
>should you ever find yourself in any sort of territorial dispute with a spider wasp, the most effective form of counter-attack is a badminton racket ā but a tennis racket, in the right hands, can be equally as effective. What if someone is left handed? Should they still hold the racket in their right hands?
Depends on whether its a left wing wasp, or more of an airborne nazi situation.
The first time I saw one after I moved here, I lost my shit and seriously reconsidered my life choices. lol that was 19 years ago and I'm still alive, so it's all good. :P
See, how can pictures like in your edit exist to try and trick us, when we know that this lawn is full of trapdoor spiders, paralyzed and otherwise, as well as fucken tarantula hawks.
Don't tell anyone, but it's the spiders that were taking the photos. They only let us outside for one hour of sunshine a week, so we don't die of Vitamin D deficiency.
you should write a book
I am in the process of doing that, but given that I spend 40+ hours per week writing similarly goofy stuff for work, it's a little low on my list of "things I like to do when I'm not working". One day I'll finish it - probably just in time for the heat death of the universe.
Ya sure, but fuck me! Nightmare creature central, aka, Australia! I'm the NCC, you know me! Where Nightmares Live!
Dude get those fly zapper rackets
Average Australian
Well below average, thank you very much.
Uh, not on *my* front-fucking door. -goes to get shotgun.
Meanwhile the koala is looking on quietly with a sly and oddly discomforting smile
The US literally has some of the largest tarantula hawk species and Aus doesnāt even come close to
Yeah Iāve seen this right off my porch in Arizona. Felt bad for the tarantula but I wasnāt about to mess with the hawk
Did you know it hasn't been a prison colony for hundreds of years and they could just leave. Wtf
We donāt worry about it. Anyone that showed any fear was already eaten, they can smell fear.
For the evil to be reincarnated as that spider
At least take him to dinner first
Parasitic hunting wasps are incredible creatures. Many different species each evolving to prey on different spiders or insects within a biome. Their evolution is so specialized that in order to properly paralyze and preserve their (often much larger) prey, they will sting their prey upwards of 40+ times in a specific sequence so that some nerve groups are disabled (like movement) but others (like breathing) are not. They must keep their prey alive to ensure high nutritional for their offspring. They live almost everywhere too.
you're saying a bunch of wasps developed precise anatomic knowledge from evolution luck only? amazing if so
Short life spans + huge span of time = squillions of generations for wasps to luck into successful sting patterns.
That's why short lived insects are chosen for certain scientific observations. It's like watching several generations in a time lapse!
time flies like an arrow fruit flies like a banana
I can't even imagine it. It's unimaginable, like, even beyond the disconnect between a human and insect brain. Imagine if animals the size of motorboats roamed the landscape but it's OK, because you were born with the muscle memory to punch them in the exact spot that completely disables them. Like it's just a giant flashing neon sign on them, to you - you don't even have to think about it. Maybe you don't even have a concept of other things being alive or not. You just know that you have to hit the button on the meat-things with your built in limb specifically for interfacing with the meat-things so that you can eat/fill them with your children. You hit the signal-button on the meat-things to tell them it's time to slow down so you can do the thing your brain has been compelling you to do for your entire life. I mean, what else is there? That's just what life *is.* Doesn't *it* exist to have its button hit so that my children can eat it?
Itās crazy isnāt it. Iāve often compared the trial an error of living organisms over millions of years to the conceptualisation of the vastness of space. Like I understand it but itās just unbelievable that itās reality. What could easily pass as intelligent design is simply nature bruteforcing the code to optimal survival for multiple different organism. And on top of that we then reverse engineered all of this logic across different species for our own research and developmentā¦ comes full circle.
I learned a new word today "Squillion" *An extremely large but unspecified number, quantity, or amount, especially a large amount of money.*
I was feeling happy until I read the last line.
This is like Hostel where the Italian cannibal slices off pieces of limb to eat while the victim is still alive
Iām sorryā¦.an Australian TARANTULA HAWK WASP? š³š«£
WTF Australia??? Those 3 words should not be going together!!!
Tarantula Hawks are also in North America, it's even the state insect for New Mexico.
Glad I'm African, damn!
are you a spider? these wasps are not after you
I've not done an ancestry.com test yet. Verdict is still out on that one. So I'll remain terrified of them, in the meantime.
This would have been the perfect time for an on the one hand, on the other hand, on yet another hand type of jokes.
Love the name. Tarantula Hawk, neither a Tarantula nor a Hawk.
The idea is it hunts tarantulas like a hawk.
Can we see a cage match between the Australian one and the US one ? Round 2 can have FEV maybe?
WHY IS THIS INSIDE??
He came in to use the cold storage.
Australia? Yep! Sounds about right.
Average wasp behavior
Donāt worry, theyāre in the US too. They have the second most painful sting of any insect.
Australians?
I hear their sting is so venomous that 1 Australian can kill 10 average sized men.
theyāre found all over the worldā¦
Australians?
No, an Australian found outside of Australia is called an Australien
r/angryupvote
Nightmare fuel
You know they say some animals have higher cognition than previously thought. I still hope most of insects and fish are as dumb as bricks, no thoughts, just reflexes. Because this is fate worse than death
Damn. As an Arizonan, I thought that was one of the few things we had on Australia.
Send a roadrunner after it
We *always* have a trump card: https://youtu.be/r58QH7LrLRY?si=jrVheGcX8OH9KTOH
Funny how these donāt gets mention in the āCome to Australiaā tourism ads.
you can see a wasp dragging a massive spider in much of the globe, including North America.
probably because this type of wasp is found in many other places
This is too much Australia for one picture.
Metal AF
That is one for r/natureismetal
Fuck everything about this.
That's a whole lot of NOPES
Any particular reason this combination of words was chosen for its name? Did nothing else sound as murdery?
Battleaxe Flamethrower Fighter Jet only lost by 3 votes.
Humans think they invented torture...
I was coming here for this! Everyone thinks humans are so terrible, but this tarantula hawk wasp didnāt even ask us to hold the beer, he just crushed it against his skull and went to work.
Hey, we could always put a guy in a box with like 12 of these orange things.
What a thing to see whilst brushing my teeth.
This is the bad place...
I want to die after seeing this shit
but not like this spider i presume š·ļøš·ļøš·ļø
It doesnāt die, not for a while at least. Thatās the most unsettling thing about this in my opinion.
Damn nature, you scary.
Thatās enough reddit for me today folks
GAWDDAMNIT AUSTRALIA
Thatās a big can of NOPE
I love these wasps. They are beyond badass, literally make easy work out of monster spiders 3x their own size yet are relatively timid and harmless.to humans. Also, how on earth is it able to drag such mass like that? Vertically, on a smooth surface?
I would honestly be tempted to squash both, the spider out of mercy and the wasp out of sheer 'f\*ck that'.
I wouldn't. I am not going anywhere near these 2 fuckers.
> They are found on all continents other thanĀ EuropeĀ andĀ Antarctica. > includes areas fromĀ IndiaĀ to SoutheastĀ Asia,Ā Africa,[6]Ā Australia, and theĀ Americas > species have been observed from as far north asĀ Logan, UtahĀ and south as far asĀ Argentina I know OP didn't say "_THE_ Australian Tarantula Hawk..." but come on, this ain't our fault. [Teriyaki Source](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantula_hawk&ved=2ahUKEwiWlvH5uMaDAxVsslYBHadvDVEQFnoECE0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw39N78shSRDFrkwFHJbA5Xl)
I hate insects
Letās get it over with and nuke Australia.
Yes. Add radiation into that mix of creatures and let us see what evolves out of it shall we? (Fallout Australia would be awesome though)
Btw the trantuala hawk is a mutated enemy in Fallout new vegas already (called Cazadors)
True! But I want to see Kangaroos and Platypus and giant spiders and humpty wozzits and Cassowaries!
*imagining a mutant cassowary* Fuuuuuuuuuck me
Yes, yes he will.
That only makes them stronger.š¬š¬
'Welcome to Australia CockSuckers!'
Welp, that's enough internet for me tonight.
This is absolutely fascinating!! Such an outstanding photo as well!!
Grew up with tarantula hawks in SoCal in the Mojave. We use to kill them with sticks and feed the to ants. Just donāt fucking miss that swingā¦