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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
World
Milo Boyd

Mum asks "should we burn the house down?" as spiders infest daughter's bedroom

A mum joked about moving out after finding a horrific spider infestation in her daughter's bedroom.

Claudia Domrose made the stomach-churning discovery in her daughter’s room in Sydney, Australia.

Footage the mum took shows around 50 spiders spitting up in the top corner of the room.

In UK spider terms, each one of the baby arachnids is as big or bigger than the largest eight-legged specimen found on our shores.

To make matters worse, Claudia pans across the room to the other corner to reveal an even larger mass of insects.

They scuttle up and down the magnolia walls, covering a patch about a metre and a half across.

“Are you moving out now? Shall we burn the house down?” the mum joked as she looked on.

Luckily, Claudia seems the right kind of person to be plagued by enormous spider infants, describing them as 'cute'.

The spiders are believed to be baby Huntsman.

Her daughter slept in the bedroom while the infestation was ongoing, albeit away from the bulk of the spiders.

The smaller of the two infestations (Storyful)
The mass of scuttling bugs stretched across the painted wall (Storyful)

The insects are “famed as being the hairy so-called ‘tarantulas’ on house walls that terrify people by scuttling out from behind curtains", according to the Australia Museum.

While they may look terrifying, they aren't too much of a threat to humans.

Those who have been bitten are advised to put ice on the wound.

The species rarely bite, but when they do, it is usually because they're protecting their young.

The large critters are just babies (Storyful)

Fortunately for Claudia and her daughter the critters disappeared long before they reached maturity.

A fully sized huntsman can reach 30cm in legspan

Robert Raven, an arachnologist at the Queensland Museum, said the infestation was likely caused by rain following a heatwave.

“Spiders go looking for milder environments in terms of heat and humidity,” Raven told Australia’s ABC News.

“So inside a house it’s usually good. There’s usually some water around and they’ll gravitate to that.”

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