chooks4life I hope you don't get banned. Anyways this is a completely random question and has nothing to do at all with what this post was originally about, but I've always heard horror stories about how big the spiders are in Australia. Is this true?
Yeah, I hope I don't get banned too LOL. I mostly meant that as a semi-joke but at this rate, time will tell... Certainly when things inexplicably occur without reason or warning it makes sense to expect anything.
About the spiders, I'd guess about 99.999% of spiders in Australia are normal size, lol... You get some with very long legs, and sometimes some very large individuals, but that's normal for any country that has spiders. Possibly you see more spiders of the Wolf spider or Huntsman types here than in most other countries, so people think they're all big going by leg span, but really most of them just have long legs with comparatively very small bodies.
They can make excellent little pets, too, you can take a wild spider and train it to take live prey from your hand without them making a mistake and biting you even once. Their intelligence (and benign nature towards non-prey species) is generally underrated.
Some of the largest spiders I've ever seen were so shy of humans that you couldn't get within 20 feet of them, they'd be fleeing in terror for their lives as soon as they saw you. Those were rock spiders of the Huntsman type which lived on rocks above streams, they had very, very long legs with bright blue knees but were so afraid of people you could only see them from a distance. They'd throw themselves into the fast-flowing water and be carried away rather than eye you from meters of distance, or scurry around the rocks to get away from you.
Best wishes.
