In one of those odd news stories of the day, a woman who recently returned from a trip from an African rain forest in Cameroon discovered that she had been carrying a huntsman spider all the way back to her office in London in her bag.
Her office is the Rainforest Foundation, which employees were startled but probably less freaked out than our local Sevierville Visitors Bureau might have been. Heck, probably less freaked than we would have been. It is not every day we come across a huntsman spider, or even a spider of their size.
Eco-worker Nora Serrat, 32, had been working out in part of Cameroon’s rainforest.
However her return to work on Thursday gave colleagues a bit of shock.
A three centimetre Huntsman spider, named after its hunting style, scurried out of her backpack at the Rainforest Foundation’s offices in Kentish Town, north London.
The creepy crawly was said to be holding an egg sac which contained up to 400 babies.
While most workers stood stunned to see a spider that big, others stepped in to capture the jungle insect.
When we dropped her off, she was alive and apparently quite feisty.
Rachel Agnew, of the Rainforest Foundation, told ITV News: “Our office manager, Mateusz Wilkosz, responsible for health and safety, heroically took control and safely contained the spider in a large plastic box โ making sure she came to no harm – and then hand delivered โHermioneโ and her eggs to London Zoo that afternoon.”After the initial fright, workers said they became quite attached to ‘Hermione’.
Ms Agnew said that they looked out for the her to make sure she was not harmed as she was taken to the ZSL (local zoo).
The huntsman spider is given it’s name because it will more directly hunt down its prey versus setting up a web in hopes of catching dinner. The huntsman can be one of the largest spiders with a body length of about one inch long and legs that span average of 5 inches. Huntsman spiders have been found that span as much as twelve inches which would fill up the space on a dinner plate. The huntsman is a spider that contains venom for it’s prey, but the venom is not known to harm humans.
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