Melbourne man's deadly discovery inside sprinkler: 'She's a beauty'
A Melbourne man has made a frightening find in his sprinkler.
He posted a photo to Reddit writing he pulled out the sprinkler “for the first time in a while”, following months of lockdown.
Inside the sprinkler was a redback spider.
Fellow Redditors marvelled and were also spooked by the cheeky spider’s appearance.
“She's a beauty! Lucky you didn't get bitten given it's right near the hose connection,” one man wrote.
One woman wrote it “looks like a biggie”.
Others were far less forgiving.
“Set it on fire, then you can put it out with the sprinkler,” one man wrote.
Redback spiders best left alone
Dr Thomas White, from the University of Sydney’s School of Life and Environmental Sciences, confirmed to Yahoo News Australia the species is indeed a redback.
Dr White also suggested why the spider had made itself a home inside the sprinkler.
“As a mostly nocturnal ‘tangleweb’ spider it looks like it’s just found itself a nice little nook to spin a web in to pick off any wandering insects like flies, grasshoppers, crickets etc,” Dr White said.
“They don’t spin large webs out in the open like your more frequently encountered garden orb-web spiders, so any little self-contained space like this is a potential home for them.
“We might bump into them hanging in the rims of pot plants, in piles of wood, or under the outdoor furniture, for example, so the simplest way to avoid a meeting is to keep the garden neat and tidy.”
As for what to do when you encounter a redback, Dr White suggested just leave it alone.
“They’re not interested in harming people, and bites are a consequence of accidental interactions like reaching inside a gumboot that’s been sitting in the shed or poking around under the house without having a look first,” he said.
“With that said, you probably don’t want them hanging out inside your house or in frequented outdoor areas like the kids’ trampoline, in which case you can scoop them up in a small container and pop them in some nearby bush a little further away.
“If you absolutely have to kill one for some reason, leaving them in the freezer for a few hours or a quick-and-comprehensive squash with a shoe is the humane way to do it. Avoid using pesticides and chemical treatments — they do more harm than good.”
The last recorded death from a redback spider was in 1955 a year before an antivenom was developed.
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