Little Miss Muffett

The Southland Times is reporting that a woman in New Zealand was recently alarmed to discover a redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti) crawling out of a decoration in her house. After she immobilized said spider with a pesticide and stored it for safekeeping, the NZ Ministry of Agriculture & Forestry came and picked it up, confirming the id and verifying that, luckily, there were not any additional spiders hanging about. The redback, which has a painful, venomous bite, is an Australian native that currently has some established populations in New Zealand.

Thanks to Andrew B. for sending in a link to this story.

Fun With YouTube

Recent YouTube videos with a fresh, crisp, invasive species theme:

• The Statesman Journal has an interesting report about the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's search for non-native fish species in the wild. There's one about invasive American bullfrogs as well.
• Someone was nice enough to capture the lecture given David Orwig of Harvard Forest about the hemlock woolly adelgid and stick the whole thing on YouTube.
• The Florida Department of Agriculture has a creepy, crawly PSA about the Mexican red-rump tarantula.
• The Great Lakes Mayors hosted an hour-long panel on invasive species issues.
• The Zoological Society of London posted a video about surveys for invasive species in the Thames River, including the Asian clam and the zebra mussel.

Spider Web

Just came across a new Yahoo! Group called cocoonswapping. It seems full of people with a keen interest in spiders, and I cannot fault them for that. Unfortunately they also seem keen on swapping spider cocoons/egg sacs, and doing so on a global scale. The issue of invasive species has already arisen in the group, which was just created this past month (see this message), and obviously group members have good intentions and are not planning to release the spiders into the wild. However, I still am concerned about the concept of sharing species across continents, especially something very tiny that seems like it would be hard to keep contained. And according to this article from the American Tarantula Society, it's legal to import spiders into the USA - I'm not sure about regulations in other countries. Yikes.