Spiders in New Zealand

A hilarious thread on Reddit when someone asked on Reddit “Are there a lot of spiders in NZ, compared to the US?”

The most popular and hence top answer was:

There are quite a few but during the summer months when they’re breeding you’re allowed to catch the adults if they’re more than 12cm (five inches) wide.

In my experience it’s best to warn tourists before they eat a dish with them in it because some people can be fussy when it comes to what they’re used to eating. TBH it’s mainly older people who have them, younger people would rather have McDonalds or something.

This then led to scores of further comments, all keeping the theme going.

You got the recipe for Katipo fritters? I remember we used to have them down at the batch. Nana and grandad would turn up in the Morris with a chillybin full and we’d fry them up on the beach with kea eggs and sheep’s milk. Never found the recipe.

Damn things are endangered now. The Katipo, not the sheep.

And

To that end, it is common for New Zealanders to travel out to the beaches and forests of New Zealand during summer (peak breeding season) to help keep numbers down, walking through the bush and fossicking through the dunes in an effort to help out our native populations by thinning numbers of non-indigenous spiders while getting a really good feed.

I don’t think I’m out of line in saying it is many New Zealander’s most treasured part of our national day, Waitangi Day, which commemorates Maori and the Crown reaching agreement on the management of our spider population, and then sitting down to a shared meal of roasted spiders, a tradition that lives on to this day.

With Waitangi day being tomorrow (Feb 6th) I’m really looking forward to my family’s traditional spider cook-up! This year we are trying a variant of pavlova that utilises spider eggs! Yum!

And quite cleverly:

It’s a bloody outrage they reduced the size limit to 12cm IMO. Back when I was a kid, you used to be able to find heaps that were over 20cm! We sold them to the local fish and chip shop, they made fritters out of them. After all the lobbying to reduce the size limits, the proper sized ones are so much rarer. I think the commercial companies have just over foraged, and we might see a real reduction in our stocks in time. That said, I can’t see it happening in the next decade or so.

Some politics:

This is why I voted National. They were the only party to promise to completely revise the Arachnid Harvesting Act so that every day New Zealanders can enjoy an eight-legged feed like the old days. Spiders and snapper were the most important election issues last year imho.

And:

But remember when Simon Bridges opened up the Spider Sanctuary to oil drilling? An oil spill would be catastrophic for our spider-based economy.

Best of all:

New Zealand actually has the most spiders per capita (SPCA it’s called in official documentation). We signed a treaty with them to give them the sovereign nation of Hamilton. …

Shortly thereafter, they died of chlamydia. …

Not ALL of them died. A lot moved to Gore.

Read the whole thread and enjoy.