If you weren’t convinced already about Australia being a country full of terrifying animals that either want you dead or shit scared, we would like you to meet Charlotte, the gigantic female spider that has been freaking out the internet since her photos were posted online.
Charlotte belongs to the huge huntsman family of spiders known for their speed and mode of hunting. In the Facebook photo that went viral shortly after, Charlotte appears unrealistically huge and can be seen hanging from a broom at an animal rescue center in Queensland.
According to Barnyard Betty who captured the photo, Charlotte was first spotted at the animal rescue center in October 2015 after the owners of the property came to clean up the farmhouse.
“The kids came running out of the house yelling to me that there was a spider,” Betty told Yahoo.
“Their mother wanted to kill it! I said, ‘no! Don’t kill it I’ll remove it!'”
However, Betty recalls that removing Charlotte was no easy task. Her usual method of transporting spiders is the classic put-a-glass-over-the-top-and-slide-a-piece-of-paper-underneath technique. But Charlotte was so huge that Betty couldn’t find a large enough glass to fit over her.
In fact, Betty recalls, even a bucket was not large enough fit over her because of the legs.
“She was the size of a dinner plate,” she said. “So I grabbed an old broom and gently coaxed her to climb onto the Broomhead.”
Charlotte was then moved to an old shed, away from predators and people so she could live without anyone bothering her too frequently. As people familiar with the giant spider have been saying, this new internet celebrity from Queensland is not aggressive at all.