A giant African spider has been found at a London primary school after it hitched a ride to Britain inside a box of bananas.
Staff at the school in Croydon had screamed when the huntsman spider leapt out of the box.
Dani Zenith, a teaching assistant at the school, said: “We’re just a regular primary school and we get free produce sent to us from our local council for the children – we were unboxing the bananas to distribute to the classrooms, and out jumped said spider.
“It was a huntsman and literally jumped out of the box – it probably jumped three feet.
Staff at the school had screamed when the huntsman spider leapt out of the box
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“The office staff and the ladies in their mid-20s were screaming, and a couple of us older staff members in our 40s wondered what was going on.
“We happily caught said spider while they were screaming and freaking out. We weren’t scared – we’re kind of enthusiasts anyway!”
The arachnid in question, a Heteropoda venatoria, was a member of the huntsman or Sparassidae family of spiders – famed for their size, and native to a number of warm and tropical regions around the world.
The huntsman had apparently travelled some 3,000 miles to the school from its home in the Ivory Coast.
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The huntsman had arrived on a pack of bananas from the Ivory Coast – and has since been rehomed
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Zenith, who uses an alias due to the nature of her work, said: “We knew straight away that it wasn’t your regular found-indoors giant house spider.
“Myself and another member of staff who is very into spiders – she has her own spider book – wanted to find out what spider it was, and is it native to the UK.
“But every time we put it into a Google search, which I know you can’t always rely upon, it just kept coming back as being a huntsman.”
Having had doubts, and in search of more answers, Zenith turned to a Natural History Museum page in order to find out more – but Google had been correct; the spider was indeed a huntsman.
While the species can have a leg span of up to five inches when fully grown – but this specimen was a juvenile male, which Zenith thought was six centimetres across.
And though the venomous species can deliver a painful bite, they’re not considered dangerous to humans – and survive on a diet of insects.
Zenith, 45, said: “This, for me, was a positive, fascinating, educational find, and the children and myself loved finding out about this stowaway.
“In no way was it scary or negative or anything to be concerned about… We just opened a box of bananas and out popped this magical creature.”
The spider has now been rehomed.
