How are we supposed to identify the critters?

Surely El'Reg should be providing us with the means to quickly identify said arachnids so that we can stamp on the buggers as soon as we see them.

I will now be forced to obliterate every poor arachnid i see just in case it is of the poisonous variety....

A spider bite isn't a sting, but I'm sure that it feels similar enough that it could be useful to have a description of the pain intensity as it might fit into the Schmidt Sting Pain index?

The honey bee sits just above the Yellowjacket, whose sting is described as 'Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.'

That doesn't sound too bad to me, but if the False Widow sits above the honey bee (the type of bee isn't given in the article) this could mean its sting is more like that of the Red Harvester Ant, descibed as 'Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.'

I'm in no hurry to meet a Red Harvester, so, El Reg, please tell us: Should we guard our tongues or our toenails?

...coming over here stealing our webs.

How are the little buggers getting in? Hitchhiking on bunches of organic holistic happy-clappy Fairtrade bananas? clinging to the bottom of Eurostars whizzing back from Belgium? sneaking aboard Margaret Beckett's free-wheelin' caravan whilst she tours Calais' finest hypermarkets?

This could be a disaster for Middle England. The 'Daily Express' is going to have a fit that yeoman English spiders are being displaced by their workshy and swarthy foreign relatives. Inevitably it will lead on how toxic arachnid henchmen working for Prince Philip bit the driver of Princess Diana's car, causing the fatal crash, meanwhile the Mail will worry: 'EVIL FOREIGN SPIDERS THREATEN HOUSE PRICES'.

I expect nothing less than the appointment of a minister for alien spiders and a Commons statement assuring us that biometric identity cards (or indeed biometric catflaps) will soon solve this eight-legged crisis.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/insects-spiders/

spiderbites/false-widow-steatoda-nobilis.html

Here is a picture of the bitch ! copy and paste the above to avoid !

poisonous means it has toxins if eaten venomous is through injections

I live in a first floor apartment with communial gardens that, in a fit of low maintance dullardesk landscape design, they carpeted the borders with random plants and ruddy woodchipping....

cometh the woodlouse

...cometh the WOODLOUSE EATING SPIDER!

and those swines are also poisionus and on average bite us once both around once a year!!

go on, google woodlouse eating spider!!

horrid hirrid horrid thangs!!

....eueghh!

I think this all just a publicity gimmick for the new Spiderman movie?

My (fairly unused) garage has hundreds of them camping in and around the roofing. I first noticed them after I moved in 4 years ago. (Bristol area)

...obviously, that's how they eat: their saliva turns the insides of the prey into an oxo-type broth held together by its owner's skin or carapace.

So the question is: which of these poisonous creeps can bite through your skin and inject its venom? All the larger ones, plus a few (mostly Australian) small ones...

Why is it that everything has to be because of global warming?

It is (more or less) common knowledge that the climate cycles, and the temperature is supposed to be on an uprise just about now. The greenhouse effect and all that does probably amplify it somewhat, but I still haven't read a credible report showing beyond doubt that it is made noticeably worse by man.

The best report I've read so far has data some few hundred years back which is, in this context, a short moment, and not long enough to make a reliable statistical model. For that you need accurate temperature and CO2 measurements dating back a few thousand years,

Yes, the temperature is rising now. MAYBE we can do something to slow it down. Can we stop it? No.

Now this is a spider

http://www.afpmb.org/pubs/Field_Guide/Images/originals/Fig.%2018.jpg

>I will now be forced to obliterate every poor arachnid i see just in case >it is of the poisonous variety....

"They only bite if mishandled or provoked."

So, the answer is pretty much to learn a lesson from US of A / Blair foreign policy.

....OTOH, if you don't, I guess we'll know which spiders they were by watching you flail around :)

maybe we should issue them with id cards, because that would surely stop the immigrant spiders from biting people.

</sarcasm>

Bah! There's was company that used to import cars from California complete with little black stowaways. They weren't dead either! The mechanics used to scour the cars looking for them before dispatching with a heavy boot.

I wonder how many got away.......?

"That's not a spider.

This is a spider..."

Here in Sydney, you can easily find these at the bottom of your garden:

http://www.amonline.net.au/factsheets/funnelweb.htm

Why is it that everything has to be because of global warming?

It is (more or less) common knowledge that the climate cycles, and the temperature is supposed to be on an uprise just about now. The greenhouse effect and all that does probably amplify it somewhat, but I still haven't read a credible report showing beyond doubt that it is made noticeably worse by man.

The best report I've read so far has data some few hundred years back which is, in this context, a short moment, and not long enough to make a reliable statistical model. For that you need accurate temperature and CO2 measurements dating back a few thousand years,

Yes, the temperature is rising now. MAYBE we can do something to slow it down. Can we stop it? No.

____________________________________________________

To this I say AMEN. I am old enough to remember that in the 1970's scientists were telling us we were heading into an ICE AGE and it would come sooner if we didn't mend our ways!!!! This is a fact, look it up. This whole global warming issue is a mechanism for unemployed scientists and their companies to get public funding and to sell newspapers/magazines.

One of these nearly bit me last week. When I walked into my dining room, I saw something in the corner of my eye and it was one of these in the middle of the room suspended by a single strand of silk in mid air.

Eventually it climbed up, but when I moved it went back down again and dropped on the floor.

At this point, it didn't last very long.