Tarantulas, Fire Ants & Snakes, Oh My!

As if the floodwaters from Hurricane Dolly weren't bad enough in South Texas, throw in some nasty little critters to make it even worse. Only in Texas. :-)

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9251MP81&show_article=1

If you've never seen what fire ants do in flooding situations, they basically ball up in one, big mass while floating around waiting for something to crawl up on. I've seen them on Lake Ray Roberts before when it flooded. It's incredible. One such mass found it's way up onto my boat via the outboard. It wasn't pretty...for them. They met their demise with a can of Raid before they could get a strong foothold and take over the boat. ;-) Of course, I couldn't help but delight in swatting any other wads of those ciritters with my fishing pole thus scattering them by the thousands on the water's surface. The perch had quite a feast. :-)

But, in the story above, I was quite amused that the reporter considers tarantulas as deadly. Really? Is that deadly to crickets and grasshoppers? They are physically harmless to humans, at least in this part of the world.

I used to have a few as pets when I was younger. However, there was one I had that was completely psycho and would attack anything and everything that came near it. That one stayed in the jar at all times. As harmless they may be, they'd certainly give you a severe case of heebie-jeebies if they climbed up your leg to escape the floodwaters. Perhaps the reporter was just "embellishing" the story for emotional impact, eh? Or perhaps as a youngster, they saw the movie "Tarantula" too many times. LOL!!