Redback Spider Deadly 60 Bites

On Deadly 60 I've had loads of incredible animal encounters.

Here's just one of my many favourites.

This is Deadly 60: Bites.

Although, I personally much prefer looking for wildlife in the wild,

in the forest and jungle, there's no getting away from the fact

that some of the best places to find animals

can be right in our back yards.

This is the ideal place to look for spiders.

Australia's well known for having some of THE most venomous,

THE most potentially dangerous spiders on the planet

and it's obviously those that I'm looking for.

Actually I'm looking for one in particular,

Australia's best known and most feared.

Watch your head, Steve.

-Mind your head, Steve.

-Not doing very well at the moment.

Yeah, that's gonna work.

Tucked in here is one of the most feared spiders in the world.

In some other parts of the world this is known as the Black Widow,

here in Australia it's called a Redback.

Let's see if I can get her out.

Just coax her out onto the web.

Here she comes.

There.

There she is.

Probably, to Mark at the moment,

that's just a tiny little black blob,

let's see if I can light it up with my torch.

Isn't she wonderful?!

It probably looks like this is just an untidy mess of a web,

certainly in comparison to the beautiful dew drop covered ones

you'll find in your back garden,

but actually this is an absolutely brilliantly designed way

of catching flying insects.

The real genius of this three dimensional web is found below.

These threads here are placed under high tension,

it's like someone's got an elastic rope

and stuck it down using a big patch of glue.

They're all over the place, a maze of trap lines.

So when an insect, like this ant here, wanders up,

it snags one of those trap lines and fires it up into the air.

So it's just dangling there, suspended, they mostly ensnare ants

but the lines are strong enough to catch large trapdoor spiders

and even lizards.

The victim's struggle causes the line above to vibrate,

alerting the ever ready female Redback.

Then she heads down to haul it up, bite it and paralyse it.

That venom, designed to immobilise its prey,

has the unfortunate side effect of being extremely painful

and toxic to us too.

About 600 people a year get bitten.

Right, to get a closer look at her

we're going to have to bring her out the web.

As this is one of the most venomous spiders in the world,

one of the only ones that has a bite dangerous to humans,

I'm gonna do that carefully.

'I use my rope knife to coax her out.'

Come on, lady.

Here she comes.

Come on.

There she is.

Wow!

The way people usually get bitten is if they put on a pair of shoes

or something that has a Redback inside of it

and she'll get squashed and bite in defence.

This is a very, very careful, cautious process.

As long as she doesn't feel restrain and restricted,

then really she's very unlikely to bite.

Right.

You can see that wonderful red flash down the abdomen

that gives her her name.

With her amazing elastic web

and a bite which could even do me some damage,

the Redback spider is definitely on the Deadly 60.

Small but deadly, Redbacks employ genius tactics to catch their prey

and there's enough venom in a bite from one of these guys

to stop me in my tracks.

That's why they have to be on the Deadly 60 list.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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