Sunday 19 April 2015

Biggest Classroom Spider: Can You Help?

Ashton with the Vagrant Spider he found by the carshed
Its the final days of the holidays today - Mr Webb's been thrilled during the break with all of the students who have been able to create some amazing posts during the holidays.

Ashton just posted this yesterday - its an amazing post about a Spider he found on his farm, a Vagrant or Prowling Spider.   Ashton's researched the spider, using Google and taken all these photos - you can read all the details on his brilliant post here.  

What we wanted to ask you - what's the biggest spider that you have locally? Can you (safely of course) take a photograph of it? Can you identify what it is? We'd love to here some feedback from some of our online friends!

The Vagrant Spider with a pen so you can see the size.

What information would we need to know about the Spider? Are there sites that you can link to your post with details or information about the spider?

In New Zealand we only have one poisonous spider, the Katipo which is an endangered native spider, which is extremely rare.  There aren't any other poisonous animals and we don't have any snakes.

This isn't the first time that Ashton's posted brilliantly about some of the creatures around us, with help from his Mum he also located the massive Tiger Slug that was found earlier this year.  If you want to read about this creature then you can click on the link to the post on his blog here or see the slideshow that was created when we passed it around for our students to experience.  Jorja also has been catching Eels on her farm, read about it here.




3 comments:

  1. That's quite some spider Ashton found there!
    I caught this one scuttling across my living room floor last autumn https://www.flickr.com/photos/ianinsheffield/15236020151/in/photolist-pdmzYB-oCoERh-oE9MXn which I *think* is a House Spider (http://www.uksafari.com/housespiders.htm).
    Maybe Ashton could confirm that for me?

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  2. Mr G
    Thank you so much for your comment - I will get Ashton onto this tomorrow and that you so much for the information and the links as well.
    Mr Webb

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  3. Wow, that's a big spider! When I was young I helped a friend clean her pool. In the basket we brought up a huge tarantula. It wasn't even dead. That was the biggest spider I've ever seen. Here in California we have a lot of Black Widow spiders around my house.

    http://kidblog.org/MrsUlleseitsClass/

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