A terrified fitness coach stumbled across potentially one of Britain's most rare spiders at his countryside property after coming home from a night out. Dan Ghuman, 29, dropped his late night kebab in horror when he encountered the enormous critter on his Leicestershire wall in the early hours of October, 1.
Dan said after laying eyes on the beast described as the size of a ''small drinks coaster'', he had a feeling it wasn't an ordinary spider. After posting a photo of the creature online and doing some research, he quickly realised that the huge creepy crawly he found could be a rare and endangered species, Leicester Mercury reports.
The eight legged vistor resembled a type of spider known as a 'Gnaphosa nigerrima', which were first taken note of in 1994 in Wybunbury Moss, Cheshire but are more common in parts of Europe and Asia. The man, who admits to being petrified of even daddy long legs, confessed that his first thought was not to identify the species of spider.
"I'd had a few drinks and when I saw it, I just dropped my kebab in horror," he told LeicestershireLive. "I took a picture because I thought, 'That's not right', and then friends and random people started replying to me on Instagram saying it was that specific spider.
''The house backs onto countryside so we expect a few spiders and things, but that wasn't like anything we've had."He said he could not bring himself to move the spider from the wall, and is now "on the lookout every day", hoping it has not made its way into the house.
"I'm checking everything as I walk into the house at the moment," he said. The Gnaphosa nigerrima is generally known to live in wet peatlands.
It was previously only thought to have inhabited one place in Britain. It is more common in parts of Europe and Asia, and has been recorded in countries including Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Poland.
Joshua Styles, an ecologist and botanist who has featured as a presenter on Countryfile, discovered one of the rare in Staffordshire in November last year. Our sister title, StaffordshireLive reported that Styles later learned that it was only the second British sighting.
Don't miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond - Sign up to our daily newsletter here.
