This featured in several news outlets a couple of days ago:
Quote:
Mother finds deadly spider eggs in Tesco bananas
Abby Woodgate poked a white lump on her bananas which turned out to be cocoon full of tropical spider eggs
A mother who found eggs belonging to one of the world’s most venomous spiders hidden in her Tesco bananas had to have her vacuum cleaner incinerated after she tried to clean them up.
Pest control experts hired by the supermarket told Abby Woodgate, 30, anything that had been in contact with the bunch and its deadly cargo would have to be burned.
At first she had thought the bananas were mouldy when she noticed a white lump after they were delivered to her home.
But when she poked the mysterious growth with a toothpick, a cocoon opened, revealing dozens of tropical eggs.
She immediately threw the fruit in the bin, but a few eggs dropped on her kitchen floor, which she vacuumed clean.
When she called Tesco's store in Colchester, Essex, staff said they would come round to collect the bananas. Later she received another call saying pest controllers would come round instead.
Mrs Woodgate said: "The pest controllers asked where the eggs were and I told them the bin and they said 'right, we'll take that'.
"Then they asked had anything else come into contact with the eggs, and I told them about my vacuum cleaner, so they said 'we'll have to take that too'. All they could tell me is they thought they were tropical spider eggs."
|
and...
Quote:
British supermarkets buy shipments of bananas from tropical countries including Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Colombia, home to some of the world's most venomous spiders.
The Brazilian wandering spider oftens hides in bunches of banana and occasionally stows away in shipments to foreign countries. The species are known to have some of the most toxic venom in the world, causing loss of muscle control and breathing problems, and eventually death.
In November last year, a Tesco store in Kent was forced to close for several hours after a Brazilian wandering spider was found under a box of bananas.
|
Daily Telegraph
Google News
A few months ago I was at the checkout at my local Tesco when a spider ran out of a bunch of bananas that was about to be weighed.
It shot along the conveyor with commendable despatch and disappeared down the hole where the cables for the card terminal are routed.
The lady on the till, who I know quite well, just smiled and wasn't in the least bit surprised. 'Oh, we get a lot of those' she said.
Now, I don't know if it was completely harmless or whether it had the potential to visit multiple deaths upon the local populace, but I noted that the bananas came from Costa Rica. See above.
