If you have arachnophobia, I probably wouldn’t watch this one.
There are a lot of people that find spiders of all shapes and sizes to be pretty terrifying. I usually just choose to step on them if they bother me, but that act isn’t as easy for others.
If you had to classify spiders into “scary” levels, it would be safe to say that tarantulas sit atop at the highest creepiness scale.
Tarantulas can range from being as small as a penny to as big as a dinner plate, and it appears that this one that is casually floating by in the water falls somewhere in between those two sizes.
You wouldn’t catch me trying to step on a tarantula, and I certainly wouldn’t mess with it if it were walking on water like in this video.
In the intimidating footage, a kayaker floats up on a rather large floating arthropod on top of the water. As the person directs their boat up beside it and zooms in, it turns out to be a massive tarantula.
If you are like me, I wasn’t aware that spiders could walk on water. Apparently spiders are able to traverse their way across bodies of water thanks to “surface tension.”
Tarantulas like this one are able to appear to be walking on water by rowing on the surface and utilizing their front three legs as paddles (really cool, but really scary).
The video shows the giant spider floating by the boat, then jumps forward to a clip of the spider closer to shore making its way to land. You can tell in the back half of the clip that the tarantula is really making progress across the water’s surface as it nears shore.
So for those of you who are scared of spiders and thought you could find safety in water, turns out that is not the case. Spiders can effectively climb, swing, and crawl just about anywhere.
Watch the tarantula “moon walking on water” in the video link below:
Sheesh, I’m not really afraid of spiders and I still don’t really care for that.
I also don’t care for the “you eat 8 spiders a year while you are sleeping” belief, so now that I think about it, maybe I am a little scared of the 8-legged web spinners…
