WALES, UKFirst of all, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that RedFish won't be reading this one, even though it will download onto her PDA tomorrow morning before she goes to work. The thing she needn't worry about, though, is that the nasty creature emerged from a box of bananas... and she's allergic to bananas.
A tarantula-like spider which has been biting an elderly man in his sleep has been in his house for several weeks, according to the RSPCA.
The 76-year-old man first noticed a large spider running out of a box of bananas he bought some weeks ago.
Police inspected his house in Newport, south Wales but found nothing. The man subsequently suffered two bites.
He finally spotted the spider early on Wednesday morning. The RSPCA is now trying to remove it from his home.
The arachnid is described as being as large as a human hand.
RSPCA spokesman Gethin Russell Jones said a collection officer had been despatched to the home in Bettws, near Newport, to retrieve the spider and take it to a vet for identification.
He told BBC Wales' news website: "He's quite an elderly gentleman. He noticed a large spider months ago when he bought the bananas.
"The police came around and environmental health came but couldn't find anything. He thought it had gone away."
Mr Jones said the pensioner had been bitten twice while he slept but had he had not initially connected it with the spider.
Recently though, he began to feel more ill and while lying in bed in the early hours of Wednesday, he saw the spider running up a wall.
The man, who did not want to be interviewed, was reported to be dehydrated and sick, but it is not clear whether this was as a result of the spider bites or not.
Anyway, this kind of story literally makes my skin crawl. This large arthropod, known as a "kwabaryen" in Haiti, lost in one's home? I don't think so. Living in Iowa, however cold and miserable it may be otherwise, isn't home to many nasty spiders. Oh, yes, the funnel-web spiders and the brown recluses DO show up here from time to time, but not nearly to the degree that they did in Texas. We also don't have poisonous snakes here except for a very few rattlesnakes in one isolated area near Winterset (where John Wayne was born, appropriately enough).
I have a deep-seated, irrational, visceral fear of spiders. I have tried in recent years to acclimate myself to them; to study them, to try to understand them, and in some ways I am less prone to flattening any and every spider I see. I've learned to recognize the ones that will "get me" and the ones that have no intention (or even ability) to harm me.
I still get heart palpitations if I see one in the house, regardless. I'd probably lose all bladder control if I saw one like the poor man in England did.
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