Who ever said freight forwarding was boring…. British warehouse staff had a terrifying experience when emptying a container, which was a freight forwarding shipment from Australia. A giant spider thousands of miles from its native Australia gave warehouse staff at a British warehouse, a belated Halloween scare on its arrival.
The freight forwarding job produced very unusual cargo, a seven-inch-long huntsman spider. The stow away arrived at the East Sussex Port, packed in a shipping container packed with BMW parts from Taiwan.
The Huntsman spider, as large as a human hand, is believed to have been nettled snug an warm for up for six weeks as the container made its way thousands of miles across the oceans before reaching the UK.
Terrified staff at BMW Distribution in St Leonards-on-Sea discovered the arachnid lurking in their delivery while unpacking the boxes. The staff initially thought this was a plastic toy spider, a member of staff playing a joke! Once they realised this was not a toy, panic kicked in and the staff looked for a large enough plastic container to catch it, until they decided who they needed to contact to get this critter removed from the premises.
A staff member is said to have joked that “one day we’d open one up to find some kind of ferocious animal in there, but I never expected to find a spider as big as this.” Did not expect with our usual day to day freight forwarding that this would actually happen!
An RSPCA inspector was called out to capture the spider, but admitted she was not the biggest fan of eight-legged creepy-crawlies and that she had been called out to collect a scorpion in the past after someone accidentally brought it back from their holiday, but I’ve never come across a spider like this before.
The spider was captured in a secure container and taken to the RSPCA’s wildlife centre nearby in Alfriston near Eastbourne, and staff have reported this species does not generally pose a threat as Huntsman spiders can give you a nasty bite, but they aren’t likely to cause too much harm unless you suffer an allergic reaction. However, because they are so big and they run around so quickly, they are probably an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare.
Arachnids can survive a long time without food and water. The cold is going to be the main problem for them, but it probably survived the journey because the weather has been fairly mild. The wildlife centre is currently observing the spider to determine whether it is male or female to be able to give it a name.
