Tasmanian Funnel Web Spiders

[Bill_Board]

Hi gang. Sorry if this isn't the right forum to be posting about spiders, but the only Australian spider forum I can find costs money to join...

I'm seeking any information about Tasmanian funnel web spiders, particularly species in southern Tasmania. I've heard/read that they can be found in New Norfolk and in the Huon Valley area but there isn't really much information on Google to go on.

Thanks in advance for any information you may have for me. I'm not out to hurt/catch them or anything, just wanting to see one with my own eyes.

Cheers!

 

[TassieHerper]

Unfortunately I am unable to tell you anything extensive as I am not a spider person but i will look through my material and see if I can find anything. One thing I can tell you is that we have a spider down here that is often mistaken for a funnel web called the common black house spider. It is often found around windows on and in houses. It produces a funnel style web like the funnel web and it is jet black. The female of the species is the larger out of the sexes and gets to approximately 18 mm in size. It is not as venomous as the funnel web with bite symptoms ranging from headaches nausea and isolated swelling and itching of the bite area.

Any way I shale sees what I can find for you.

Tassie Herper

 

[Bill_Board]

Thanks and lol yeah, the good old house spider. Always makes me laugh when people call them funnel web spiders.

 

[Smokeyinoz]

Tassie funnel web.

Hey Bill,
I can't help much with info but I actually came across a Tassie funnel web last week while demolishing a partially enclosed veranda (the spiders home too) on my old house up north. I'd seen the web there for a few months but never realised we got 'em here in Tassie, just assumed it was a black house spiders web. It took a while of web searching to identify the beast through pictures but I have no doubt after eliminating all the other spiders that were kind of similar. It's the first one I've ever seen. Black with small faint tan marks on the abdomen, hairy, a bit bigger than a 50 cent piece. It was one impressive looking spider. I hate spiders but couldn't help checking this one right out. That was before it bolted towards a cavity in my house. It never made it. I turned it into concrete fertiliser....... Sad really, I would have loved to have caught it. Since then, I was talking to a bloke who knows of another funnel web killed just half a mile from my place. Needless to say, I've fumigated the sheds just in case.
Cheers, Smokey.

 

[RosPeck]

Hi there, I recently worked on "Power Plant" at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, a lighting technician was bitten by a spider while near one of the big pines on the right as you go down the drive way. The gardeners had a look the next day and identified the spiders (apparently there were quite a few) as Tasmanian Funnel Webs. Hope you can find one

 

[tyson001]

join the aif here Australian Invertebrate Forum - Forum

 

[Gundeman]

Tassie funnelwebs are as common as armpits in Myrtle (Nothofagus cunninghamii) forests. They are similar in behaviour to tree funnelwebs, usually living in holes in logs created by boring insects (aren't all insects boring?) with the radiating webs from which they ambush passers by. They are quite fast-moving. The most common one has brown patches on the abdomen. I don't know how many species there are but I would expect there to be more than one.

 

[Hoplophile]

Look up Hadronyche pulvinator and H.venenata. These are two species of Tasmanian funnel webs. There's a view that even Atrax robustus (Sydney Funnel web) is more correctly a Hadronyche sp. but changing the name would cause chaos in the medical world. Hadronyche are widespread with the largest being the tree funnel web H.formidabilis.