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Great website with a lot of very valuable information. Regards, Ron

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Hi, We uptil this point but we are being invaded by white tails in our home. We look after young children under Goverment contract and have been unable to get much info on white tails. We are very intrested to find your site. Thankyou Rod.

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I want to thankyou for your informative web page as it truely has been a blessing. My partner and I had spent a very frustrating year in 2002 as he was injured in Afganastan after 9/11... it took him ten months to recover enough to come back here after medical treatment etc. Finally he was home and we spent six glorious months resting and enjoying the peace that Tasmania can always provide. His health improved rapidly and life was good. He needed to go back to the States for two weeks to clear things up, ship his furniture, bikes and sign contracts for employment he was about to begin in Sydney. Even though we had said we would never be apart again, his health was so good, he went alone while I organised things from this end, it was only going to be two weeks. Well, he rang me the day he got home and said I have an itchy foot, must be from the new shoes you bought me, something in the leather. He was busy packing and running around and about 4 days later informed me that his foot was getting worse, lots of blisters and it was bright red, he had a massive headache and felt like he was getting the flu. He went to the hospital in the States and not wanting me to worry said they were working on it and its probably chemicals reacting on his skin from exposure to them in the past during his time in the army. Well you can imagine my reaction when on the sixth day they were talking about amputation. Once I was over the intitial shock,picked myself up off the floor, I asked him to describe to me exactly how it looked, and having seen the effects of a white tailed spider bite before I knew that was it. I have seen them in and around the house and this area is known for them. I researched the webb and emailed the address for your site to him and he referred them on to the medical staff. Luckily he still has his foot even though he has a wound 6 inches long and 4 inches wide with no layers of skin left, he takes great delight in showing his daughter how his muscles work, much to her horror. Tomorrow he has an appointment with a plastic surgeon for skin grafts. This silent night time invader not only waited until the last night he was here to bite him, but has extended our two weeks apart to who knows how long and thrown our whole lives into a different orbit with everything on hold. The pathology department in the States is having a field day with his samples, they had never seen anything like this before and again, thankyou for your informative page, it was such a relief to be able to point them in the right direction before they came at him with the chain saw. He has survived three terms of combat in the army, helicopter crashes,broken arms and legs, 17 lesions on his lungs from fumes and fire in Afganastan but said none of that can compare with what one tiny spider has put him through the last few weeks.

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Where I live in nz white tail spiders are very common. I heard somewhere that they are only as poisonous as the last spider they have eaten- they do like to prey on daddy long legs and apparently these have very toxic bodies. My husband, son and I have all been biten. My son felt something bite his leg when he was under the house putting in cable. I took him to the pharmacist who diagnosed a white tail spider bite. This was my first introduction to white tails- I was blissfully unaware we had any poisonous spiders in nz other than the katipo- which does not hang out around houses! My son took antihistamine and the bite cleared up after a month. My husband was bitten on the hand and had a nasty ulcer for 4 months. I was bitten when clearing around the back of an old shed- I knew there were white tails there so put on gloves and covered my body up- I got bitten thru a shirt on the arm and this developed into a small itchy swelling which lasted about a month- wasn't bad though. I keep my house clear of cobwebs by dusting and spraying spiders with pyrethrum. However I stll come across white tails every couple of months- yesterday I found one on the curtain I was pulling across. A recent case in the newspaper reported a 20 yr old nz woman dying 4 weeks after a white tail bite. Doctors were unsure if that was the cause of her death- she developed septicaemia- sounds suspicious to me. I really dislike these spiders and wish people would take this issue seriously. well done on your website