I thought about calling this article Ebola Infected Puppy Spiders Smuggled Over the Border by ISIS but I digress.
Forget the spider dog prank, this is an actual spider the size of a puppy! The South American Goliath birdeater may be the worst thing that exists: a spider so big you’d probably just want to hand it your wallet and run if you ever crossed paths with it. Sure, the notion of a spider crawling up under your skin is pretty freaky, but it turns out that spiders don’t really do that. What some spiders actually do, though, is grow to the size of dinner plates and run around hissing and biting things.
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1546710/arachnopephobia-harvard-scientist-finds-a-spider-the-size-of-a-puppy/#VjAx2GBh3wb6MkZ8.99
Piotr Naskrecki was taking a nighttime walk in a rainforest in Guyana, when he heard rustling as if something were creeping underfoot. When he turned on his flashlight, he expected to see a small mammal, such as a possum or a rat.
“When I turned on the light, I couldn’t quite understand what I was seeing,” said Naskrecki, an entomologist and photographer at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
A moment later, he realized he was looking not at a brown, furry mammal, but an enormous, puppy-size spider.
Known as the South American Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), the colossal arachnid is the world’s largest spider, according to Guinness World Records. Its leg span can reach up to a foot (30 centimeters), or about the size of “a child’s forearm,” with a body the size of “a large fist,” Naskrecki told Live Science. And the spider can weigh more than 6 oz. (170 grams) — about as much as a young puppy, the scientist wrote on his blog. [See Photos of the Goliath Birdeater Spider]
Which begs the question, how many times would you shoot this f*cking thing?
-Sig