While perusing news brought to us by NeverEatOrSleepAgain today, I came across:
…a woman who found exotic poison stowaway spider eggs in her groceries?
Ugh. If I had to read this nightmare fuel today, I’m grateful that:
A – It was early enough to inundate my consciousness with unicorns and rainbows before bedtime and B – That I already ate my effing morning banana breakfast. ‘cause apparently whoever is tasked with extracting venomous spider babies whose mothers snuck them in from overseas on our fruit (“I just want a better life for you, my children”) just can’t be bothered to do their job. Some British chick called Abby found this out the hard way, after getting her delicious bunch of golden fruit home and noticing some “mold” on it.
When she poked at said “mold”, it opened up to reveal a batch of spider eggs.
(Actual moldy bananas never sounded so good).
“I couldn’t believe it when the little cocoon opened,” she said, “I thought it was just some mould and I was trying to get it off so I could use the rest of the bunch. Even when I saw what was in it – it looked just like frog spawn – I still didn’t think the worst. But then it dawned on me and I jumped and threw them in the bin.”
First, yes – that’s how the British spell “mold”.
Second, no – that’s not where the fun ends.
Had Abby been less curious and indeed just wiped off the arachnid sac before eating the bananas, she very well may have experienced a great deal of pain before too long. Then loss of muscle control. Then breathing problems. Why? Because these guys were spawned from the Brazilian Wandering Spider – the deadliest in the world – whose venom can cause paralysis and asphyxiation. And just like us, they like bananas.
Sidenote – they also can make your banana stay turgid for hours.
But can we all agree this is not worth keeping them alive to study?
So toxic is their juice, that when Abby called pest control, they said she needed to destroy anything that came in contact with the eggs – including the vacuum cleaner she used to vacuum up the ones that cascaded to the floor during her initial poking at it. So, the authorities took everything that’d touched the evil infant bugs (and I assume sent it down a laundry chute to hell) and peace was restored to the land. But not to my mind. I gotta hand it to her – this bish was far smarter than I am. Had it been me, I would have screamed until my vocal cords snapped like a fat man’s suspenders, napalmed my house, and moved to another galaxy where four legs is the legal limit.
You know, I realize my generic fear about all spiders is terribly irrational.
And I honestly don’t like to live in fear. My spider-phobia doesn’t keep me from hanging out in nature. However, I do sorta figure that a title of “most venomous in the world” mixed with “bananas” is worth giving a head nod of “I’ll look into that”. Especially when I live on fruit and am in love with exotic vittles that hail from the same countries as these eight legged paralytic death dealers. The fact that it was Britain, not USA doesn’t mean anything. Too close for my liking. So these nuclear nopes may not ever make me “nope” my fruit.
But this is definitely grounds for grabbing my noms inside out from now on.
Plastic dog-duty style.
