Australia leads the world in its number of resident venomous spiders as well as the strength of their toxicity. However, of almost 9,800 species (only about 3,100 species are named) of spiders in 70 families throughout the country, most are perfectly harmless.
As with other animal types, spider diversity in the Wet Tropics is broad and many fascinating species occur here that range from the ominously large to the tiny and hardly noticed, from the dullest browns or black to the vibrantly hued or deceptively shaped.
Spiders can be roughly classified according to the strategies they use for feeding. Spiders which appeared earlier in the evolutionary scale fed by waiting in a burrow for food to come along before grabbing it. Following them were spiders which actively wandered looking for food and which caught it by ambush or chasing it down. The evolution of flying insects created an incentive for spiders to find new ways of catching food and so the earliest aerial web weavers arose.
The Wet Tropics spiders on these pages are discussed under primitive spiders, open range hunters, ambush predators and weavers.
Here are some fascinating and sometimes gruesome facts, you may or may not know about spiders.
Allowing spiders to take up residence around dwellings can be beneficial in that they catch other annoying insects such as mosquitos and flies. If you find a spider in your home that you don't want there, you can use a large drinking glass to trap it by gently placing the open glass over the spider as it sits on a wall or flat surface; slide a sheet of paper under the rim so that the spider is trapped inside when you move the glass. Take it outside and toss it into a shrub or let it escape onto a tree trunk. Avoid using insecticides to kill spiders as these chemicals also kill other animals like frogs.
A good rule of thumb is to look and admire but don't touch any spider you find. Even those without venom can still have a nasty bite.
Here are a few handy links with more information on spiders.