I tagged this Boston because I could not find a “New Hampshire” or “New England” tag, nor a way to make one.
First coyotes, now venomous snakes.
Good excuse for using Instacart
For decades, entire ships loaded with bananas docked at the port of Tampa, just blocks from downtown.
The population of enormous tarantulas that hitched a ride was impressive, and it was completely normal to see them in and around the local businesses. The local climate is hospitable to all kinds of tropical critters, so they thrived.
This arachnophobe nearly lost her cool completely when I saw a car run over one in an empty (and unpaved) lot…and the b*stard got up and ran away. shudder
The area has been completely urbanized now so I think they’ve all but disappeared.
The biggest we have up here in my area are wolf spiders, but they are still more than enough to give me the occasional jump scare. BF hates anything spider and tells me it’s why he will never visit Australia. I suppose if I told him about the tarantulas in Tampa, it might give him an excuse to not visit his parents!
Well, that’s a nightmare.
I sat in my car having a full freak out because I needed to get out of the car to make a client visit and all I could think of was that damned spider waiting under my car (even though he ran the opposite direction)
The banana docks have been gone for years, so I suspect the tarantulas are long gone, too
In one establishment I cooked in, the boxes of bananas were often filled with ‘hitch hikers’. I learned to wear gloves after the first encounter.Thank goodness they were not camel spiders being shipped!
I worked in a building that had a hatch of wolf spiders one year. Good news was we quickly saw all the roaches and mice disappear (old building near a railroad track in a warehouse district in Florida…critters are inevitable)…but we learned to turn the lights on in our offices in the mornings and then wait 30 seconds til we went in. A few near cardiac events taught us that lesson the hard way!
This is what I remember from the childhood years - the stories of the spiders in the bananas. The snake was actually quite tiny from the news reporting (I’m in Boston, so it made the news), so I can see how someone didn’t see that.
I feel bad for the snake who wakes up being completely disoriented and doesn’t know where it is.
There was a kid in my apartment building in Uganda who put his hand into a boxing glove on Boxing Day when he had another kid visiting, and withdrew it when he felt a sharp prick. At the end of one finger was a snake, fortunately non-venomous.
We had a couple of snakes in our apartment too.
JUSTICE FOR THE SNAKE.
I walked into the kitchen a few weeks ago to find a red rat snake expired in the middle of my floor. I felt bad…he was pretty, and fully grown at about 2-1/2 feet long (75ish cm)
Im not afraid of non-venomous snakes… I’d have done my best to get him outside, but it was too late.
My house would already be under contract if that happened here
And yet you can find these weird stories. What does that say about you?