aaaaagh! It's not a spider!

[Kate Arbon]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/7585391.stm

Sorry but I had to vent. Every paper I've read this in has got it wrong and so has the bbc. Which has led me to believe that article writers actually do NO research at all, and I am now giving up on all news sources forever and relying solely on what I can see out my window to tell me what is happening in the world.

[Stuart Lee]

Saw this in another thread, But yes as usual the media get it wrong altho Im sure this is called a Camel Spider so maybe thats where they got the name from.

[Lee_Ross]

see this makes me wonder....

be pretty easy to get on the news if you made a report about a nasty camel spider in the house...

and the crap about it killing the dog ... did you notice that no-one said ... vets reported that the dog had DEFFO 100% been bitten, surely if bitten there would have been marks...

my opinion... a lot of nonsense all round, but hey... whatever at least some of us are educated enough to know the truth !.

[Steve McIntyre]

Hi Guys and Girls... with all the publicity this article / news report has received, maybe we should start putting up signs on our houses, to keep burglars, etc, out...it could say 'Beware of the deadly Camel spider!' Crime would fall overnight! Maybe some enterprising person could breed a few thousand of these and sell them as the ultimate security accessory! Who'd need a Rotweiler then?

[Colin D Wilson]

That's it then Steve, you breed them and i'll design and produce the warning signs.....we could enter for the "young (ahem) entropeneurs award" in 2009

[michaelmckinney]

LOL Can I do the marketing for your enterprise please?? LOL We could breed a modified strain that are double the size and even more aggressive, I'll hit the lab now LOL.

Michael.

[Colin D Wilson]

Of course you can Michael, but as we're going for the "young" entropeneurs award you'd have to be in your late teens / early twenties like myself and Steve

[michaelmckinney]

Well Colin,

It's lucky I'm only 23 then or could've missed out big time there LOL!!!!

Michael..

[Phil Rea]

I e-mailed one of the editors on the BBC site about this one, for all the good it'll do. Absolute rubbish!

[Colin D Wilson]

as long as it made you feel productive mate !!!

You never know if they got a lot of contact about it they may think better of getting facts right next time...possibly not but we can only hope

[Phil Rea]

as long as it made you feel productive mate !!!

I did feel slightly better after pressing send, so it must have

[Johanna Turner]

I had a major rant in work when I saw this too! What a farce! Another bit of hype, and another example of people not getting the facts first. I wish there was some way of one of us going in to get it out, rather than some useless prat from the RSPCA who was probably terrified of the idea of a 'spider' being in the house!

[Kate Arbon]

it doesn't even look like a spider

[Colin D Wilson]

it doesn't even look like a spider

To the uneducated and misinformed it probably looks just like the "monster image" they've created in their minds.

We, the educated, are able to change this, and it's societies like the BTS (and others) that have a mission to educate, inform and dispel myths and legends with cold hard fact and scientific knowledge.

It's a long and hard upward struggle but we'll get there !!!

[James Box]

it's as bad calling that a spider as it was for George Buchanan on the Lost Land of the Jaguar program to call Amblipygids "whip spiders!" lol
just cause we don't have proper unique common terms for these completely non-spider, non-scorpion arachnids, people just lump them in with one or the other.

and of course, there's the guy at the pet shop near me that has "camel spiders"...he said to me they are a cross between scorpions and spiders! i was at a loss for words, but it stood to reason given how ignorantly they keep their tarantulas etc...