Once bitten... no eight times actually
Created | Updated Feb 26, 2012
There are many good things about being a Brit in Australia. In Sydney it's generally warmer and you can go on the beach most days without wearing a balaclava and thermal socks. One of the down sides is being bitten.
At the moment I have a set of 8 bites in close proximity on the bit of my back that I cannot reach with either hand and can't even see in a full length mirror, not being able to turn my neck around like a barn owl. They are swollen and they hurt, so that discounts mosquitoes.
I managed to get 150+ mosquito bites in one day when I went out without repellent, sleeves or long trousers. I know I deserve everything I got if only for being associated with the early settlers and those bad boys that took the Ashes in 2010. Fancy not wanting to wear long sleeves or trousers when the temperature is only 35C. Every single one of those bites itched like crazy and I scratched the top off most of them before someone wrestled me to the ground and tied my hands behind my back. Well actually they told me how repulsive it was and that they would call the manager of the restaurant if I didn't stop. So I am pretty sure that these purely painful bites are not from mozzies.
I am suspecting a spider.
I try and learn things as I go, so I went to a show at a wildlife park featuring Funnelweb spiders. The man said that they are the most dangerous spiders in the world. Female spiders live to be about 20 years old if left alone, while males generally don't get much beyond 18 months as the moment they strike it lucky and get their legs over the female Funnelweb eats them.
The speed record for dying following a bite is just 16 minutes for a child and a little over an hour for a grown-up. I started listening very carefully about this stage in the discourse. Lots of places in Australia are more than an hour from anywhere.
Where might one find such an alarming arachnid?
"In your shoes if you leave them outside. A pair of gardening gloves left in the garden is a Funnelweb hotel with 10 snug rooms. They like towels and clothing, too".
Right then – no gardening for me.
"You can also find them In the dunny".
What? In the toilet! I can give up gardening, not that I ever took it up, but that is taking things a bit far.
Mr Spider Man demonstrator showed us how to capture a Funnelweb spider. He was using a female, which is bigger than a male, but quite a small creature (larger than a bumble bee but smaller than a steam iron). They are also only one sixth as venomous as the male of the species. You just take the top of a cleanish jar and lie the jar in front of the spider with the open end towards it. The spider seeing a hole cannot resist but walk inside. You then lift the jar to the vertical position and put the lid on. The spider cannot jump – despite advice to the contrary which was given out by the Government up until the 1970s.
With the spider captured you need to take the lid off and put about an egg cup's worth of damp soil in with the spider which would otherwise dehydrate and die within about half an hour. I know, you are thinking "So what?" but you should take the spider to your local Aussie hospital and hand it in so that it can be taken with the other collected specimens to Mr Spider Man so that he can milk it.
He's already heard all of the jokes about the low 3 legged stools and they just bounce off him. Once the Funnelweb is removed from the jar he has to prod it with a stick so that it goes into aggressive mode. At this point it raises its front legs high above its body and prepares to use its fangs to inject poison. This means that there is a lot of pressure on its back legs and most of its body weight is on its 4 middle legs, so it can't really run. Mr Spider Man then sucks the beads of venom off the fangs with a pipette.
As I have already stated, the female is deadlier than the male – only to the male, eating it after intercourse rather than smoking a cigarette, but to humans and other spider enemies the male is much deadlier. So Mr Spider Man likes it when people bring in males as they each produce as much venom as 6 females and therefore require less work to achieve the same outcome.
If you do get bitten dial 000 (the Aussie equivalent of 999 (UK) or 911 (US)). Then start wrapping the area which has been bitten with a tight, preferably crepe, bandage. Mr Spider Man told us that he was once bitten on the hand and it felt like he was holding his hand in the flame of a blow torch without being able to take it away.
Where are these creatures found? Sydney, sadly. That's where my flat is.
A big, dark "thing" ran across the floor in my flat the other night. It didn't look at all like a Funnelweb spider (and they spend their lives in funnel shaped holes waiting for creatures to walk past the opening so that they can invite them in for a cuppa and a bite). I still looked for the phone and in particular where the 0 was on the dial pad. This "thing" was the size of a small pony with six legs so I relaxed a bit. It was what the Aussies call a cockie or what the rest of the world calls a cockroach or cucaracha and even the nicest of houses in Australia have them. I'm not trying to put on airs and graces about my place. When someone says with a snooty voice, "You could eat off the floor in my place," I think "You could get a pretty good meal off the floor in my place, too – if you didn't mind fluff on your tucker."
So I went to the bathroom and got the WMD for insects. I let my visitor admire himself in the bedroom mirror (where I can't quite see spider bites on my back) before giving him a liberal dose of agent orange or whatever is in the spray. He didn't keel over. He ran away. I was tempted to try a bit on myself to see if it had run out of zip, but fortunately refrained. Later that night I found young cockie lying on his back doing an imitation of a medium sized toast rack.
I wonder if that stuff keeps spiders away? Whatever made a meal of my back needs a severe talking to, that's for sure.
