I warned you not to read it.

I love it Rock.I love spiders they are very cool.

Ooo! Cute and fuzzy!

When I was growing up, the kid next door once tried to freak me out with his pet tarantula . . . I probably scarred him for life when I cooed and wanted to hold it instead.

And face it, Rocky. Some of us like defying authority, others can't resist a dare.

Yikes! LOL... yes, you did warn me... *does CPR on self*

Just had to buy the fresh bananas, didn't you? *faints*

nope.. not a banana spider.

This guys much more aggressive than a banana spider (they're only paranoid). This guy will actually rear up on his hind quarters and have a go at you with his very long fangs.

You sound like Steve Irwin.

DANGER, DANGER, DANGER

You down under cuties.

Chrikey! Have a go at that!

HEY! Stevo sported a mullet! *smacks forehead* Maybe that's a subconscious reason I thought the dude was so kewl

I can top that.








I think Rick is a very brave man.

My arachnophobia is as common as any other. Why don't we like them, are it the eight paws of them or the several eyes? They're more scared than we are. Because when we freak out they run away. I've held snakes and even touched a little shark but spiders... I once was watching tv looked besides me and saw a gigantic spider that made me jump up to the ceiling. Soon it's september again and that's the spidertime of the year.
I saw a picture of a friend of mine when she was holding a spider. Think it was a tarantula.

I'm not particulary fond of them but I don't know why if they are more scared than we are. I"m sure if I want to I can come over that fear. If one person is really afraid of spiders, it's my brother.

Will it make me Spiderman?

If comic books were really like real life, yes. (assuming the spider had already been irradiated itself.)

Because in the comic book world, nuclear bombardments don't actually kill you- they just turn you into a hulking behemoth of brute force. Genetic mutations aren't actually a bad thing- they just unlock your latent powers within. Radioactive waste doesn't actually hurt you but rather just enhances all of your senses.
Cosmic rays obviously give you cosmic powers- why should they do anything else?

In the real world they give you strange spider like growths.

Just think about that phrase for a moment: "genetic mutations". It's important to tell them apart from all the nongenetic mutations you encounter, after all.

*shudders and shivers* ICK!!!!!

My former boss one day caught a tarantula and brought it into the lab in a plastic shoebox cage. He was so proud of his new pet...I warned him that if it escaped, I was leaving and not coming back.

I also have the same reaction with scorpions...funny though, snakes don't bother me a bit.

Snakes don't bother me, either, but spiders---YIKES! Just one look at them, and shivers run up and down my entire body. Some believe that our phobias of spiders and snakes come from a primitive response to danger. We instinctively know that some are poisonous or venomous, so our first reaction is fear and a desire to retreat.

How, then, does one account for the fact that some people aren't afraid of either spiders or snakes? It isn't that I learned not to fear them -- I was not taught that fear in the first place, and I didn't have it at an untaught level either. I still don't. I get squicked over other things.

well thats simple.. some people are less privative than others.

Oooo... that's a beautiful spider! I love spiders... well, except black widows and only because there was a bunch of them in the house were we lived in in 'Vegas. It gets a little creepy after a while.

But tarantulas... I had one when was younger. They don't really make good pets though. Especially when they escape and scare the **** out the family.

Yeah, right.

That is one kewl spider.

I've always gotten a kick out of creepy-crawlies. Snakes, spiders, bugs... I love them. The one exception is centipedes. Those creep me out. If I'd done better in the natural sciences, I might have been an entomologist (bug expert).

When I was growing up, about two-thirds of our backyard was woods. We'd get all kinds of bugs in the house, which is probably why I like them: I saw them all the time. I was usually the one to catch them and put them outside (mostly for practical reasons: putting one outside is cleaner than trying to scrape squished creepy-crawlie off the floor or wall). I've got a good story, too. The way our house was built, we had two doorways into the kitchen, one from the hall and one from the dining room. The one from the hall didn't have an actual door; it was just an opening. The one from the dining room had a folding door in it, though we rarely used it. On that little piece of wall in the kitchen between the two doors, we had a small desk. My mom was sitting at that desk one night, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw something jump. She thought she was seeing things, so she turned and looked. There on the dining room floor was this *big* black spider! Needless to say, she shrieked (more out of surprise than anything). Evidently, this was a hunting spider, rather than one that spun webs. My dad or I caught the thing and put it outside. We thought it was pretty kewl.

For pure gross-out kewl, though, nothing beats Madagascar hissing cockroaches. (They don't bite or anything, but they're huge black and tan things, and yes, they really do hiss!)

We have a white tailed hunting spider here in NZ that has gained itself quite a bad reputation, mostly from mis-information and assumption.

There's very little eyewitness accounts of white-tail bites, mostly it's just an assumption that it was a white-tail. They are apparently related to Australia's Red back Spider, but the worst reports I've ever heard of are large swollen sore areas which last for weeks on end. And theres much debate over whether they are caused by the spiders poison, or just infection of the bite wound.

To be admired from a distance. As I said earlier. these guys are very aggressive and very poisonous to primates (ie humans).. but in a show of mother natures evil sense of humor, other animals such as cats and dogs are pretty much immune to them.

There's a similar phenomenon here in Washington State in the US, with the brown recluse spider. Authenticated sightings of the brown recluse are all but unheard-of in the western half of the state -- but I have talked with literally dozens of guys who swear they've had a brown recluse encounter, and often a bite. There is never any proof, and all they have is a swelling that they're sure is a spider bite (usually unseen by a doctor and untreated) -- one that, according to the authorities, doesn't match an actual brown recluse bite.

But they are always Very, Very sure that it Really Was a Brown Recluse. Oooo. Of course, they get a big macho thrill out of what they assume to have been a Very Dangerous Encounter. For some reason, I have grown very skeptical about these stories.

But they are always Very, Very sure that it Really Was a Brown Recluse. Oooo. Of course, they get a big macho thrill out of what they assume to have been a Very Dangerous Encounter. For some reason, I have grown very skeptical about these stories.

You should start mentioning to those guys about how Brown Recluse bites cause impotency... see how long it takes for that Brown Recluse bite to become something else... like maybe an infected mosquito bite or something.

Diabolic plan, Rocky! (I like it!)

Me too!! You are so sometimes, Rocky!

Your pic looks like some species of tarantula. I know those are venomous, but I didn't think they were deadly. Am I wrong? Or is that a different kind of spider entirely?

It's a Sydney Funnel web from Australia.

When I first moved to Nevada, the first thing folks warned me about was the brown recluse (and the black widows...)

Never saw a brown recluse out west, even though we were in a rural part of town part of the time (plenty of black widows, though.) Didn't see a brown recluse until we moved back to Florida. Scary little bugger! And I mean little. I had to put on my specs to see if it was, in fact, a brown recluse. Only heard of one bite in all the years we've been here. And it was BAD. Poor guy had to have his arm amputated after being bitten on the forearm. And that was after months of constant treatment. *shiver*

Still shake my shoes out every morning, though... just in case.

Isn't the funnel web spider the most deadly?

*facepalm*

That's it! That's exactly what I should do!!

EEEK!!!!