back to article Poisonous spiders invade Britain

A Natural History Museum expert has warned that global warming is giving invasive poisonous spiders the chance to thrive in Britain. The false widow spider, Steatoda nobilis, was first recorded in the UK in 1897, according to the museum. The female's bite can hospitalise an adult man. One victim reported: "Bitten on the …

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  1. Mark

    What No Pictures??

    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....

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bloody foreign spiders...

    ...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.

  4. KIM SHERWIN

    BITCH SPIDER

    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 !

  5. Mike D

    venomous ;-)

    poisonous means it has toxins if eaten venomous is through injections

  6. Alex

    I blame the lazy gardeners and those wretched wood chippings!

    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!

  7. Luke

    Publicity gimmick?

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

  8. Andy

    Interestingly

    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)

  9. Marvin the Martian

    All spiders are venomous...

    ...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...

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Enough with the global warming already

    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.

  11. Big Pete

    That's not a spider...

    Now this is a spider

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

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ID Cards

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

    </sarcasm>

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Black widows live in the UK

    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.......?

  14. matt

    To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee...

    "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

  15. Bucky

    Global Warming????

    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.

  16. psycx

    In my house!

    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.

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