Smart spider

So it was scary. They ain't supposed to be that smart. We got in a shipment of mystery wood at work yesterday, planks of varying lengths ripped off skids, de-nailed (more or less) and used by us for strapping our own shipments of book covers. There is some vendor who collects old skids from wherever source, then per a contract once every two weeks sends us a load of the lumber, strapped into a load maybe 7 feet high on a 7 foot by 5 foot pallet. Often some of the wood is damp and moldy because apparently the vendor stores the pallets outside before the wood is salvaged from them and usable boards shipped to us.

Anyway we move the wood to our wood storage area with a forklift then cut the scraps and start pulling out the boards we will need. Really we use it all fairly quickly.

So yesterday me and a co-worker go to pull some boards to use. All of a sudden this huge 5 or 6 inch brown and black spider drops off one of the boards we pull. Scuttles around a bit and sees no place to go. He turns around and faces us. Does a little dance waving his front legs at us and swaying. Then when he realizes we aren't retreating and are actually now both looking (staring really and totally ready to jump if he does) at him, he/it stops, lowers his legs, then flips over on his back and curls his legs as if he is long dead and completely harmless.

To me and my co-worker both, any spider that big and also smart enough to play possum when he knows you see him is a very dangerous thing to have near you. So my Co-worker promptly freaked at the possum act (she was cool with it till that) and she smacked it into goo with a 40 inch long board. Possum that dude! It took a few hours of Internet search but we made a possible ID of it as a central American Banana spider. Good call on her part I think, as they supposedly have a potentially fatal neurotoxin venom. No cameras allowed in the plant this week so I have no photos to show you, but yes it is very much dead, swept up with the sawdust later and gone.

Amazing the stuff that sometimes comes in with the old wood and rolls of paper. Snakes, spiders, birds and lizards. My guess is that the random sampling of shipping containers still needs tweaking.