Truly Disturbing Photo Of A Huntsman Spider’s Nest Is The Only Reason I Need To Never Visit Australia’s Outback

Huntsman Spider

iStockphoto / Andrew Haysom


Australia is extremely high on my list of countries that I want to visit. The problem is that it’s so damn far that you sacrifice two days on each end of your trip just traveling there. A day to get there, a day to recover, and a day to get home + a day to recover from the insanely long flight.

In the future, if you bros are ever reading BroBible or looking at our @BroBible Instagram and see me mention something about wanting to book a trip to Australia’s vast wilderness then PLEASE, please remind me of this photo below. It’s all the encouragement I need to never visit the Australian Outback.

Maybe remind me that I can stay on the coast and fish for Black Marlin off the reef. Or just skip it altogether and go to New Zealand and fish for trout. That sounds like an excellent vacation.

You know what doesn’t sound like a relaxing time? Finding this fucking devil’s nest of seriously poisonous Hunstman Spiders holed up in some ‘nest boxes’ there were erected by Bush Heritage Australia. In their blog post, they say they expected to find the Pygmy Possums which quickly made a home in some of the boxes but they definitely did not expect to find this horrifying congregation of spiders.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog post they link to:

It all started about the same time we were finding Pygmy Possums in the boxes, but on lifting the lids of some we found many huntsman spiders of all sizes whizzing around inside.

We now know that they’re a species of huntsman that live together, normally under the bark of trees. In the restored area tree bark is in short supply at present and they’ve found the wooden boxes suitable.

A single adult female lays eggs and the successive generations of siblings help each other out and share prey items. This has several advantages for the spiders including faster growth. They’re also heavier and healthier.

So the big female here lays eggs and the rest of the spiders just jump in line and start helping each other survive like some sort of advanced civilization??? But instead of humans (or bears) these are horrifying spiders living in the Australian outback just waiting for some jackass tourist like myself to lumber along so they can eat me alive???

According to the comments in their Instagram post, the possums and spiders actually cohabitate in these boxes sometimes which seems like a horrifying sight to stumble upon as well: “They don’t live in boxes with huntsman colonies but there are enough other boxes for them. Sometimes we find a possum in a box with a few spiders so it seems they don’t predate on them!”

Again, if I ever try and plan a camping trip to Australia and you bros catch me discussing this then please come back here and send me this article as a reminder that there are places like Iceland which offer stunning natural landscapes and NO spiders to eat me alive in the Outback.