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Originally Posted by Minnie

I'm not a fan of spiders. At least not the little ones. They give me the heebies.

I spent just under 3 weeks in the Bahamas (Eleuthera) many moons ago and so many of the spiders there are huge. We stayed at a boarding school (shut down for summer) and did some service work for them in order to be able to stay there. We'd come into the "cafeteria" in the morning and turn on the lights and bugs a'plenty would scatter - lots of cockroaches and other bugs I couldn't identify. We had to do a special clean of the counters, etc, before we could use anything. The big spiders were fun though. I can't recall the name of them, but they were really big - wolf spiders maybe? We used to have spider races lol - they were most often on the ceiling right over the tables, so we'd use big sticks we kept by the door, to tap the roof behind them, to get them to go running over to the other side of the room, so they didn't suddenly drop onto us while we were eating. I think the fact that they looked like they were the size of dessert plates (well, their leg span made them about that large, or they looked about that large) and easily seen is what made them not so heebie to me.

One of the guys found a tarantula on the basketball court one night and picked it up and was handling it and it suddenly jumped and lordy, they make quite the splat noise.

The other 2 bugs that were so creepy were the big arse centipedes or millipedes or whatever they were and some kind of wasp. Uck uck uck. Nasty things those centipedes/millipedes. We went to check the fishing lines of one of the school's "housefather's" one evening (he was trying to catch a shark, no idea why), and we could hear a buzzing that sounded like a horde of wasps but was really only a single wasp. Beautiful looking critter - large black main body, looked like black velvet, and orange wings. We were warned that they "don't just bite, they take chunks, and you don't ever want to tangle with one." I'm sure we were told the name of it, but I don't remember. A quick google doesn't seem to turn up any pictures of what I remember it looking like. Pretty, very beautiful insect.

I did community development work in Guyana, which is just above Brazil. We'd routinely see giant red centipedes around the construction site. They looked like this:


If they bit you, you'd apparently get a fever/trip that lasted a week.