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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Not that that long ago (10 years? 15 years? Phones with camera were already common), a very rare brazilian wandering spider bit someone in a supermarket in the UK. It then looked ultra aggressive, which is uncommon for spiders, so someone took a picture with its phone.

If I remember correctly it's thanks to showing the picture to the doctor, which had it sent to a zoo (!), that they realized how dangerous it was and thankfully another zoo (?) had the serum.

My memory is fussy but it happened, in the UK.

Turns out the spider traveled all the way from Brazil into... Bananas.

Another common name for the brazilian wandering spider is the "banana spider" : )

Too lazy too google it so I posted what I remember ; )

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneutria

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Is this it? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/4489033....

From the wiki article, "Phoneutria venom is potentially medically significant to humans".

I feel like that sentence gives very little actual information while giving readers' imaginations the opportunity to run amok.

Oh it's seriously bad I think:

"The spider's name means "murderess" in Greek, which is appropriate for the deadly arachnid. And it's no wonder why — it's one of the most venomous spiders on Earth. Its bite, which delivers neurotoxic venom, can be deadly to humans, especially children, although antivenom makes death unlikely."

https://www.livescience.com/41591-brazilian-wandering-spider...

And the citation points to a news article that doesn't even make the claim.

>It then looked ultra aggressive, which is uncommon for spiders, so someone took a picture with its phone.

Spiders carried phones back then? And lent it to a human? By the gods.

It might be a preference to use it/its as gender-neutral pronouns instead of singular they/their.

Kind of wonder how common that is nowadays, since traditionally I would think people could take it as an insult where they're being referred to as a thing less than human. Tone can generally disambiguate intentions, though.

I've never encountered it on purpose. Even as a deliberate insult it's more likely to cause confusion than the desired effect.

Yes, I didn't mean as a popular insult, but you just wouldn't use it on a person, say 20 years ago, because it was used exclusively to refer to things and animals.

Right, I'm saying it still is used (approximately[0]) exclusively for things and animals. I only brought up insults as an extreme case that highlights the common case. For people you still use "they" etc[0].

[0] This kind of thing is never absolute. We can surely find counterexamples if we dig hard enough, but rarely enough that we can ignore them for discussions like this.

Yes. It's named Phoneutria because it always carries a phone.

When we were kids, my brother worked produce at a Winn Dixie. He'd told us more than once about finding giant spiders in the banana boxes, so I'm guessing it's not an ultra rare occurrence.

Highly Deadly Black Tarantula is well documented, but I'm surprised it's still an issue for modern grocery store employees as opposed to 1950s banana boat workers

How many insecticides are you allowed to spray on the bananas between when they’re picked and when they’re delivered to the grocery store? Modern sensibilities may have increased the likelihood.

Phoneutria can be suspected or discarded looking at its face. Eyes arranged in a square

having worked in grocery store, we once found scorpion in a box bananas we were stocking. no one was stung fortunately. It did freak out one arachnophobic coworker of mine though.

Always check a bunch of bananas before putting it in your cart.

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