We had this one, above, visit our room while we were staying in Maui. It's rather smallish for a cane spider. Oh yes, they get larger! The one living in my mother's kitchen can easily span the top of a tuna fish can. That's got to be about 3 1/2". Yes, Mom likes her spider. She was mad as hell when the cleaning lady killed the last one. I had to go find a wild cane spider, capture it, and let it loose in her kitchen. Mom's happy now with her new "pet".
The spider in the hotel room has done battle with something bigger than itself. How can I tell? It's missing a leg.
Why would someone want one of these jumbo spiders around? Because they are rather benign, don't spin webs, run away when you see them, and catch a heck of a lot of nasty type insects. They help keep the population down on moths, flies, cockroaches, and even scorpions. I don't know if they would tackle a centipede, but they will grab and eat just about anything they can catch.
Most people around here consider cane spiders "good" and thus don't kill them. Though I don't kill any, I do get quite a start when I happen to surprise one. Gosh, it's hard not to jump when such a huge spider makes a high speed dash right across my line of vision. Eeeek!
Yowsa! Wowsa! I really don't like big spiders and especially ones that run fast. Like wolf spiders. I can handle daddy long legs and those kind of sloth-like spiders. Everybody hates tarantulas but I think they're neat. They crawl slow. I would shoo it out of the house if it came in. We had a grass spider in the kitchen the other night. The cat found it. They look like cane spiders. They're probably in the same family since cane is a kind of grass. I guess. A lot of shrieking and wasp spray later the poor creature was deader than a door nail. I say: don't come into my home. I don't go into yours.
ReplyDeleteThat is the one thing about the tropics that is not attractive to me. Big insects. On Oahu I never saw anything like this but then we weren't around the old cane fields. I like the geckos. They're benign, yes? What's this business about centipedes? I keep hearing about centipedes.
Fineartgourds emailed.......
ReplyDeleteI loved you're story of Fran's protection of her cane spider! Giant like that, it is probably a female. We had scads of them in Capt. Cook in that big coffee shed complex we lived in, way down Napoopoo Road.... until I started my usual with multiple cats. Do I remember them brooding their eggs under the body in carry? We also had five species of geckko at that house. There were no doors or window glass. It was very organic....
Unfortunately, I have to clear out the spiders occassionally up here....very deffinitely not housebroken! But, even with my cat-eaten screens, I don't suffer from flies and mosquitoes- or not for very long- when I let my spiders keep the corners.