expiration date 

a big spider (about 10cm in diameter) ran across the room. koda jumped and flattened the spider with her paw. the spider, who’s quite big, recovered and ran to another side of the room, after dropping a whitish, yellowish sac filled with 200 (yes, TWO HUNDREDS) small spiders, which soon ran around the room.

koda finally killed the mother spider. then, ari and i put koda out of the room and started to spray the little ones with bug spray, trying to get all 200 of them. after that, we had to sweep the carcases and wash the floor so that Koda won’t lick the floor and get poisoned by the bug spray.

that scenario above has happened twice in the past 4 days. the first time, the spider was so huge that i screamed upon seeing it. koda came to the rescue, and chased the spider. it was right after dinner, in our kitchen.

the second time was last night. it happened at 3 in the morning. and it was in our working/living room, which is big. the small spiders were basically everywhere… we did floor cleaning — sweeping and mopping, practically the whole house at 3:30 in the morning.

this is crazy.

Heteropoda Venatoria is domestic huntsman spider widely found in Singapore. they are large wandering spiders. these spiders have been found outside of our house, usually on the porch. they’re big — so far the biggest one is about 12cm in diameter. they’re not the furry kind and they ran very very fast.

i’m not going to post the pictures, because they creep the hell out of me. but if you want to see, here is two pictures i found on flickr:

• big spider near the ceiling.
• close up of the spider — this is is sooo closed up that i can’t stand seeing it. so, let that be a warning.

you see, i’m scared of spiders…. the thought of having them running around the house, along with their 200 babies, which someday will be as big as their mothers is a VERY disturbing thought. so, i had to find out why all of the sudden, our house seems to be their breeding ground.

after a short research on the internet (woohoo, internet rocks!), we found out that they feed on cockroaches… so we figured, our cockroach baits around the house must’ve been expired, and a few cockroaches must’ve started living around the house. i have to admit that we have found two or three cockroaches killed by koda in the past two weeks. not much, but maybe enough for the hungry mother spiders that need to feed their young’uns.

Heteropoda Venatoria is supposedly quite harmless. many of the articles seem to portray them as the good guy, because they feed on pests, like those cockroaches. i hate cockroaches, too… but i think having these large spiders in my house will give me the same creep (if not more) than those cockroaches.

so today, we went shopping for more cockroach bait, hoping that we could get rid of the whole food chain. no cockroaches, no huntsman spiders. good.