Originally published at: Watch the haunting process of a Huntsman Spider molting | Boing Boing
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Oh hell no! Anything with 8 legs has no good intentions toward me. Logic can go to hell, I don’t like them one bit. Watched my dad recover from a Black Widow bite on his forehead, it got him at night in his sleep.
People are so down on spiders. This is cool and honestly I think kind of lovely. They were on land before us, you know…we’re the weird ones with creepy skeletons hiding inside us.
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Can’t we just let them have Australia and leave the rest of us nightmareless?
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I wonder if molting is really painful… or orgasmic. The poor thing just hung there twitching and shuddering for a long time afterward.
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That was just a moderate sized one. They get fast and tricky when the leg span is more than an outstretched hand. Makes it harder to catch them in a 2 litre coke bottle (with the bottom cut off) without catching a leg (don’t want to hurt them). Any huntsmen with a span of less than 5 cm gets to stay and hunt cockroaches.
If you want really scary, here’s a story about stings that includes the wasp that hunts the huntsmen. This man lets critters sting and bite him for science. Here are his top three most painful - ABC News
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Spiders use hydrostatic pressure to move around. The twitching and shuddering was probably the spider pumping fluid back down into its limbs so it could use them again.
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That was horrifying! Is her entire bathroom tiled like that?
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It seems a crime that egg-laying rabbits have somehow edged out spiders in easter symbolism.
To think that with different background music I’d come away with an entirely different impression. But that was pretty interesting. It’s bigger than a palm width, if those are 4" tiles.
The spasms did seem uncomfortable, but the little butt-scratch at the end was endearing. Just glad I didn’t have to see it scuttle away, juuuust out of eyesight.
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Intellectually I’m all “spiders are cool and a crucial aspect to our eco-system and blah blah blah…” but, emotionally, for whatever reason spiders freak me out. I’ve gotten to a point where I can pick up small spiders and escort them outside, but I’m no way going near the larger ones.
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It’s the way they move. Spiders move just wrong.
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They pump body fluids into their legs to get them into shape before the new cuticle hardens. They have to be “deflated” to pull them out of the old leg cuticle, then pumped up again.
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