Spiders special report

Here am I controling my own revulsion over spiders to show you these images. As you know I'm an arachnophobe and coming to Australia I was expecting to find a lot of spiders. As soon as I arrived at the airport and even before passing costums we saw this giant ad saying "Did you know that Australia has more than 2000 different species of spiders?" and shown a cartoon of a room filled with diferent spiders and webs. Things were not looking good for me at that time and I even didn't thought of taking a picture of the ad...

However, since I've been here my phobia as been controled as I only see small spiders near the apartaments (I've been lucky I know..but lets keep it that way ;-) )

But there was one spider I was curious to see , the Gold Orb Weaver , and I've spoted one of it's nets 10 meterrs afar at teh Brisbane Botanical Gardens. From the safety of my telephoto lenses I manages this photo





And a much braver Filipa went up to the beast and got this one


The size of this spider was about 12cm lenght including the legs and 6 cm sideways!

At Noosa National Park Filipa also managed a couple of good photos of smaller (5-6 cm) spiders






Since they were very still and very visible I managed to safely pass then at 2 meters length but I have to admit they have amazing patterns in their bodies.

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