Tourist's terrifying find inside toilet leaves locals in disbelief
It's one of the last places you want to find a giant spider.
A holiday maker got the fright of their life while popping into a darkened bathroom to use the toilet. Sharing their horror, a photo of the terrifying discovery reveals eight fury legs and a large body inside the toilet.
“Lucky I turned the light on,” the tourist wrote online, while explaining that they found the spider in the Philippines whilst travelling. “Assuming it’s some kind of tarantula but curious to know.”
According to Dr Bruno Buzatto, a lecturer at Flinders University, it is “almost certainly a male tarantula”, and while the species isn’t venomous, it could still hurt humans. “They're big spiders and they bite and hurt a lot,” he said. “And often tarantulas have these itchy hairs as well, so if you touch them you could get their hairs embedded in your skin and that can cause allergies and reactions, so that's another defence mechanism they have.”
But generally, Dr Buzatto explained, “they are very docile”. In fact, a lot of people have them as pets. “I'm not saying people should go do this, but I see a lot of people picking them up and letting them walk on their hands and stuff like that. They're not very aggressive animals, and none of them have potent venom that we know of.”
What was the spider doing in the loo?
There could be two reasons, according to Dr Buzatto, and the first is that the tarantula could have been trying to escape the heat.
“The Philippines is pretty humid there a lot of the time, so I'd maybe he was just hiding from the heat,” he said. “Maybe the toilet was like the coolest part of the room, and he was looking for shelter and ended up in there.”
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The other explanation is that he was looking for a mate. “Tarantulas live in burrows most of their lives and they might get out of the burrow for a bit to look for food but don't go very far", explained Dr Buzatto. “But the boys go very far because they look for girls when it's the mating season. So they leave the burrows and walk around and look for girls in their burrows to mate with. That's probably why this guy ended up in someone's toilet.”
Do we get them in Australia?
Yes, unfortunately for all the arachnophobics, but Dr Buzatto says they’re “very poorly understood”. “So there's only a few species described but there's clearly many more out there,” he said. “They are also popular in the pet trade. So a lot of people in Australia have them as pets and buy and sell them. It's actually quite an issue in terms of conservation. There's more species being commercialised than they are currently described which is really weird.”
He said if anyone does spot one in a similar situation, he would recommend using a big shoe box or something like that to try to coax them out of the toilet and then release them outside. “That's what I would do because they are beautiful, amazing animals,” he said. “Not all people know this either, but they are really long lived, they reproduce very slowly, and they're not just spiders; they have the lifecycle of a small mammal so to speak.
“So I wouldn’t flush it down. But you have to be very careful because it's still a big spider and if you get bitten it would hurt a lot I think.”
‘New fear unlocked’
In the post that has since gone viral on Reddit, the tourist went on to explain that he made sure the spider found on Coron island was removed safely.
“For everyone concerned we got back up to ensure the spider was removed safely, because I was going nowhere near it,” he wrote with a laughing emoji. “[We] had to get a team of locals in who were even surprised how big the spider was haha.”
While other Reddit users described the incident as “new fear unlocked”.
“I don’t know what this chonky critter is, but I'd sure hate to have it chomping on my dangling bits!” one person said. “I am never going to the toilet in the dark again for certain,” another wrote. “And that's why it's important to always turn the light on before pulling down your underwear,” someone else added.
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