Pages

September 10, 2008

A beauty of a beast.

I've seen big, hairy spiders on the northern tip of Baffin Island before. I was amazed to see them running all over the tundra, but I now realise that there are probably hundreds of thousands (and even millions) of spiders living in even more northerly climes.

There is a fairly diverse bunch of spiders in the Yukon, too, but I don't recall seeing one like this around Whitehorse before - not that I'm an expert on Yukon arachnids.

Eight legs on a two-by-four.

I have a friend who used to work in a grocery store and would pull live black widow spiders out of banana boxes. I suspect that this beauty of a beast may have traveled north in a shipment of building supplies (more on that another time), but that's only a guess. Are there any arachnologists out there who can set me straight?

Not a HUGE spider, but it's big enough and hairy enough to tickle if it were to climb up your pants.

3 comments:

Meandering Michael said...

For the record, the "if it were to climb up your pants" wasn't intentional - it was a formatting glitch.

I decided to leave it that way to get all the arachnophobes out there squirming.

Matt, Kara, Hunter and Cavan said...

Oh that is a big spider! You are right- there are heaps of spiders on the tundra. I was amazed at how many would run across you when sitting there picking berries.

No idea on your pretty one there though!

Christopher Wheeler said...

Found your blog while trying to identify a spider I just found on the shore of Marsh Lake. Here is a link to the photo I took, https://flic.kr/p/HFhr3V. I suspect that is is some kind of Wolf Spider but I am just guessing.