Seeing as my “spider in the mailbox” was such a hit with readers of this blog, here’s another Madeley arachnid – I found this one in the laundry.

Dave took him over the road to the bush. Hopefully he a) won’t come back and b) doesn’t have any relatives in our house!

I don’t know if these are poisonous – from what I’ve read, most scorpions aren’t, particularly those in the southern parts of Australia.

Click the photo to go through to Flickr – the large version is much scarier! Dave took this one.

A friendly huntsman on the fence outside. It was quite dark and we didn’t want to startle him with the flash, so it’s a bit fuzzy.

I’ve been asked a couple of times for an update on the status of the redback in my letterbox… sadly, the story is now over.

A couple of weeks after we last visited our arachnid heroine, Dave went out to get the mail. When he opened the mailbox door he was surprised to see our spider doing battle with a large stick-like flying black insect. The black bug flew away and our little spider didn’t look very well. Dave performed mouth to mouth resuscitation but sadly it was not to be – our little spider friend went to that big mailbox in the sky.

I like to think that she’s terrorizing someone up there right now.

Here’s an update for everyone breathlessly waiting to see how my mailbox spider is doing. She’s still hanging out, threatening the postie and generally causing trouble. You know how those teenage spiders are. Her colouring is much darker and the red stripe is much more prominent. Although she’s not completely black, she’s definitely recognisable as a redback.

And so far, we’ve managed to get the mail out on a regular basis without incident.

Continuing the saga of the spider in my mailbox… today I went out to check the mail. OK, I also went out there because I wanted to check on the spider. I’m fascinated and repulsed at the same time. She’ll have to go, but I’m getting quite attached to her.

Oh boy, today she’s caught herself a bite to eat. Another “little” spider. One about four times her size. I can’t tell what kind of spider the dead one is, it vaguely looks like some kind of black house spider. Thick legs.

The postie has been and there’s letters in there now, but no way am I putting my hand in there to get them out.

They look like bills anyway. Maybe if I get some tongs or something…

If you would like to be super-creeped-out, check out the super-large version on Flickr.

When I checked the snail mail today, I found a few snails but also this little red dude. I don’t know what species he/she is, but that’s some impressive striping. I spent a good 15 minutes trying to get a good photo, before realising I didn’t have a memory card in the camera. But I really wanted the shot so I went back and did it all again. Discovered the difference between the different metering modes while I was at it

Anyone know what kind of spider I have here?

Update: The spider-in-my-mailbox saga continues