Terrified Mother Finds an Aggressive Tarantula "the Size of My Hand" in Front of Her House
“I was going 'oh my God, I have a tarantula in my house.’”
A woman in Nottinghamshire, UK was horrified to see a giant tarantula crawling across her front yard while workmen were busy renovating her house. Sarah Rodmell, 30, bravely captured the hairy arachnid and trapped it safely in a container until she figured out her next move.
What she didn't know at the time was that this specific type of tarantula is known for aggressive behavior. "It was a bit surreal to see it chilling in a box in my kitchen," the mother-of-two says. Here's how Rodmell caught the spider, and what happened to it next.
Rodmell says the workers first spotted the spider and didn't realize what they were looking at. "It was 9 am and the builders were doing work on the roof and they left some of their materials outside on the front," she says. "They saw this thing on the front curled up. They didn't know what it was but as soon as they found out it was a tarantula they all stepped back."
Rodmell bravely confronted the spider, before coaxing it into a cardboard box. "I kind of gave it a little nudge and it got on its feet and started wiggling," she says. "We got a box and we poked it into it. It was a bit surreal to see it chilling in a box in my kitchen. Every time I was walking in the kitchen, I was going 'oh my God, I have a tarantula in my house.'"
Rodmell's 13-year-old daughter Kacie recognized the patterns on the spider's back and confirmed it was an Orange Baboon tarantula. Her three-year-old son Rudi named the creature Dobby, and begged to be allowed to keep it. "I'm terrified of spiders but I worked in a care home and they brought snakes and a tarantula in, so I conquered my fears of them," Rodwell says. "But you won't catch me near any other spiders."
Rodwell believes the spider once belonged to a neighbor who moved away. "Thankfully Washington's Relentless Reptiles in Loughborough collected the spider straight away," she says. "This guy got in contact with me after I put it on Facebook and he lost an Orange Baboon tarantula a while ago moving. He lived on the same street as me but moved house in July. Somehow it survived until now. He just couldn't find it, so it must have escaped."
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The Orange Baboon tarantula is known for its aggressive personality and painful bite. "What we know mostly of how painful their bite is, is because these spiders are very popular among people that have tarantulas as pets," says Rocio Finol-Urdaneta from the University of Wollongong, Australia.
