Help ~ Major Invasion of Christmas beetles

It sure was a surprise to me that they can do so much damage. But as long as it's only a few on hot summer nights, I'll just let them be I think. All part of the food chain, birds probably love them. On the other hand when it comes to huntsman spiders, food chain be damned! They die! Lol.

Yep , you're probably right Silky , but put white tail spiders on the extinction list , i'm terrified of them ...

Yeah forgot about them Maree, they get zapped (if I ever see one). If they can lay low a horse so it's at death's door, like poor Black Caviar's brother, what hope do we puny humans have? And those orb weaving spiders that sit in the middle of the huge webs they spin across the path so I walk into it. Urggghhh! Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

Shudder , shudder , shake , shake   

It's not the Whitetail's fault, it is what they eat which is the problem, Daddy longlegs which has the poison.

The Daddy Long Legs thing is an urban myth...
Huntsmans are our friends...
Orbweavers in the dark.... ARRRGGGHHHHH yes.
Whitetails.... hmmm... a lot of bites are erroneously attributed to them I suspect. "It got infected - it had to be a whitetail".
Caviar's brother - if the news was to be believed it was actually the reaction to the ANTIBIOTIC that caused the major problems.... (I suspect they still had the horse on a high-octane ration and the lovely antibiotic probably zapped the good gut flora. Asking for trouble....)

Autumn, you are a true environmentalist by the sound of things. You can have all my huntsmen and other 8 legged crawlers that give me the creeps.
One I forgot, which puts the fear of god into me, is the wolf spider. It lives in the garden, often underground and is aggressive. Bites can become gangrenous. I've only disturbed one in my years of gardening. It stood up on its hind legs and wanted to have a go! Who do you think won? Lol. Always good to have the protection of gloves but these horrors can pierce ordinary type gardening gloves if they mean business.

silkyfizz wrote:Autumn, you are a true environmentalist by the sound of things. You can have all my huntsmen and other 8 legged crawlers that give me the creeps.
One I forgot, which puts the fear of god into me, is the wolf spider. It lives in the garden, often underground and is aggressive. Bites can become gangrenous. I've only disturbed one in my years of gardening. It stood up on its hind legs and wanted to have a go! Who do you think won? Lol. Always good to have the protection of gloves but these horrors can pierce ordinary type gardening gloves if they mean business.

Tiger snakes standing up and chasing you. Now that's a worry.

Oh Balinbear, that's the stuff of nightmares!   

Balinbear wrote:
Tiger snakes standing up and chasing you. Now that's a worry.

Brrrrrr!!!!!!

 

  

Ours are usually Eastern Browns.

Don't forget Redback spiders , i absolutely freaked when i found one of those under the rim of a plastic pot and i didn't have gloves on , so far haven't seen any since , but i'm sure they are hiding somewhere , UGGGHH !!!

Under the toilet seat.

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Funny (?) story about tiger snakes. I am a surveyor and we worked in the scrub a fair bit and I always had trouble convincing my younger brother about what a rotten and hard job it could be cutting your way through the bush.

Anyway he was unemployed for a while and I had him working with the company I was with and on this day he worked with me on a survey through some coastal swamp. He had not worked on this site before and it was not a particularly hard job but we had to walk about a kilometre into where we were working. Normally we would walk down the airport runway to save walking so far in the swamp. It was the middle of winter and the water was down a fair bit with just a few pools here and there.

Being the great brother I am and knowing how much he is afraid of snakes, (he once would not go down our front steps because there was a green tree snake seen in the area) I purposely walked into the job through the area where the pools of water were knowing full well that the area around the pools would be lousy with snakes. Despite them being really dangerous, they are usually that sleepy at that time of year that they ignore you.

Anyway I purposely loaded my brother up with as many tools, pegs etc as he could carry and led him through the swamp. As we were going through I kept pointing out the snakes to him which freaked him out a bit but the end came when we were walking along a log and I stepped off the end and stirred one up. The snake lifted its head, not in attack, more to have a look to see what is going on.

He more or less shat himself and did not want to go any further so I said okay and we went back and walked in the easier way. He never really caught onto the trick but he never again said that surveyors had an easy job.

Ahh Tiger snakes, no thanks, I worked many moons ago as a Bar Manager for a Golf Country Club, anyways i hated closing at night, the change rooms were always open and the snakes would often come into the wet areas of the showers when it was hot. Had many a young 2 footer become aggressive and turn and give you a bit of a hurry up. Gawd a hate snakes   

with 2 feet long "T" - snakes in changes rooms....I think I wouldn't be staying around long , either.......

neptune wrote:with 2 feet long "T" - snakes in changes rooms....I think I wouldn't be staying around long , either.......

The scariest thing is finding that the baby TS about 8-10 inches long had made their way under the change room doors that opened into the foyer area, getting stressed trying to get through the glass doors, to my thinking, where their are babies, mumma isn't to far away. Then there was the walk outside in the dark to get to your car to go home. became quite stressful, so the only way to deal with it, was to have quite a few knock off drinks to deal with it lol

When I first started surveying we were doing a job in some swampland south of the Caloundra. We were working about an hours walk back to the truck and then an other hour to the nearest hospital.

The surveyor I was working with told me if I got bitten by a tiger to just sit down and wait to die as there is no way that I could get to a hospital in time. He then proceeded to show me the line that I had to chop out and said see you at lunchtime and then went off and left me alone.

Of cause I thought I saw snakes everywhere but in actual fact did not see a single one made it out alive.

Goodness! I wonder what the poor creatures are saying about those pesky human beings!??  Not that I think snakes are cute and cuddly (scared stiff of them actually), but sometimes I think we take our right to walk not so lightly on this earth a little too lightly!!? Apologies if I sound a little too idealistic, just trying to put forward an alternative perspective??