"Alaskan finds "deadly" spider in bunch of bananas"
"I like my spider," Isabelle said, as she held the deceased spider in a Petri dish. Still, she preferred it when it was alive and kicking. Her mother, Jennifer Tavares, felt differently. She said she was still in shock from finding the spider.
"I thought that there was absolutely no way this was real," she said.
Tavares said Isabelle went to grab a banana from the fruit bowl when she came running back to her mother, screaming.
Isabelle wasn't the only one shocked.
"(The spider) was pretty upset at first," Tavares said. When she saw the spider, which measured a few inches wide, she said she could barely muster the courage to capture it. "And usually spiders don't scare me."
She did capture it, in a plastic container, which was wrapped with copious amounts of tape. Tavares' brother-in-law, Roman Davis, looked the spider up online and, with the assistance of Tavares' other children — Trevin and Natalie — tentatively identified it as the deadly Brazilian wandering spider.
The spider was kept contained in the plastic cup until the nest day when it was taken to the Daily News Monday morning. By Monday afternoon, it was in the hands of Scott Walker, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Walker is able to identify most kinds of spider. "I get people coming in about four or five times a year," he said. This, he says, was a special case. The spider was alive and reasonably healthy when Jake unwrapped the tape from the container and took a first look at it. As light reached it, the spider began to rapidly move around.
Walker euthanised the spider by squirting isopropyl alcohol into the container. The spider took several minutes to die. Once he was reasonably sure of its death, Walker examined the spider with a microscope.
"It has six eyes," he said. The number of eyes, and the way they are arranged, can be an effective way to tell a spider's family. Walker had a number of graphic aids to help with his search, but the spider was uncommon enough that it still took him a day to determine with confidence that yes, it was a wandering spider.
"But not a Brazilian," he said. Walker said there were roughly 200 members of the wandering, or Ctenidae, spider family. Some are venomous to humans, others aren't. He couldn't say which category this one fell in.
Most importantly, Walker stressed, there's no telling where the spider came from or how it got to Ketchikan. It could have come from South America, or any number of port cities that ships pass on the way to Ketchikan. It's even possible the spider hatched in Ketchikan, though Walker said this was the first such sighting of the spider he'd seen.
Walker presented the dead spider, suspended in a vial filled with alcohol, to Isabelle and her family Wednesday. Jennifer Tavares said the spider had a spot reserved on her shelf. Even two days later, she said she was creeped out. She said she still can't eat bananas.
"I'm going to rip apart every single banana before I put them in my cart from now on," she said.
Source: therepublic.com
