The perfect Friday afternoon article from our friend Jeff Schogol, the Stars & Stripes Rumor Doctor;
Despite what you’ve heard, camel spiders are not dangerous to people, Reddick said. “They have no venom for one thing,” she said.
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The Rumor Doctor wishes he had known this when he came across a large camel spider back at lovely Forward Operating Base Normandy in Iraq. Fearing for his life, The Doctor used a paperback to club the thing, which, in all fairness, was the size of a Great Dane.
I dunno about this one. In south Georgia, there’s a critter we used to call a tree-spider. A big one is about the size of the palm of your hand, and they’re sort of gray and fuzzy. Relation to the tarantula, I think, but they move quite a bit quicker. They hunt on the ground at night, and in the morning you can walk into their drag lines running from the trees to the ground. It’s as thick as sewing thread.
They’re actually a handsome spider (as far as spiders go, I suppose)and fairly docile. They’re bite is about like the sting of a bee in severity.
That’s the one I thought of when I thought of big, ugly spiders, until I saw a picture of a camel spider. If I had things that ugly running around in my country, I’d defect. Or immigrate. Or something. Anything to get away from THAT.
YUCK!!!!!!!!
Saw a picture of a trooper holding a dead one up by a leg once. Reminded me of the Facehuggers on Aliens.
It is right that camel snakes are certainly not a life threatening animal but it can cause very bad infection so we cannot say that its bite is harmless and we shouldn’t have any concern about its bite.