So it’s spring, and our bathroom window is permanently jammed open, and there are no screens on the windows in our apartment, here in Australia.

The other day I came home from class to find this guy perched on the chair in our bathroom:

You can probably tell by the chair, but he was several inches across.  I thought a few things:

1. I wonder if this is the most poisonous spider in the world, which lives exclusively in the Sydney region and I have no idea what it looks like?
2. How close can I get to take a picture before it jumps on me?
3. This spider is only the most obvious giant spider in the bathroom.

He was looking pretty stationary, so I decided to go downstairs and hope that he didn’t migrate to the bedroom or anything.  I don’t like to kill things that are bigger than a quarter if I can help it, because I don’t like to experience the crunch and squish.  So I waited for T to come home, and he didn’t want to kill it either because it was too fuzzy and he felt bad for it, so he put it in a Tupperware and released it into the wilds of Glebe.  I asked him, “Do you think that was a huntsman?” (giant but harmless house spiders of Australia) and he said, “No, it was way too small.”  We decided that it might have been a baby huntsman, since it’s spring and all.

Here, by the way, is a picture of a huntsman:

Yeah, we definitely need to move house before summer gets into full swing, because now that thing is out there and it knows how to get back in.

Filed in Different countries can be different, Weather (& hemispheres) on Saturday, September 5, 2009 ·