Interesting news

According to a BBC News report this week, tropical species of arachnia are setting up home in the UK. We've had foreign arthropods for centuries.
The common housespider (tegeneria domestica/gigantea) has been crawling about here for years. Thankfully, tegenaria agrestis stays in the long grass. American readers could only wish for this. This spider, a prolific biter, has become known as the hobo spider in the States. It inflicts a necrotic bite, which is incredibly painful and often ends up with a visit to the emergency room.
We, in the UK, live under the false apprehension we have no poisonous spiders. Tegenaria Agrestis lives in our gardens and fields, but generally won't enter a home because we have the massive and fast (gigantea is the fastest spider in the world) T. Gigantea or T. Duellica. These massive housespiders are friends rather than pests. Kill a gigantea (complete waste of a fantastic animal) and you will have more pillbugs/woodlice/flies than you would have had.
We also have a healthy population of orb-weavers. These are the gorgeous brown-gold spiders spinning orbs in our gardens in late summer and early autumn.
Both the orb-weaver and the tegenaria species are aliens. Neither should really be in the UK. But they are, and have been for the last hundred or so years - a price we paid when the British began importing fruit.
And still now, the same is occurring.
The false widow (steotoda nobilis) was significantly introduced to the UK in the early 80s from the Canary Islands, but there are reports of the species many years before. A member of the genus steotoda, it is very similar to the black widow and Australian redback.
This spider was initially reported as a pest in the 1990s in the south-west of England, but has been reported in the south east too in recent years. It has been spreading north ever since. Spiderlings use the breeze to travel and breed, so technically, it could be as far north as Hull and further inland. Steotoda nobilis is a small-to-large shiny spider not unlike the US Black Widow or Australian Redback, with a bulbous, very shiny abdomen with a patchy white circle/star shape on the top of its abdomen.

Another foreigner with a nasty nip is the tube web.

These are two videos from the BBC this week. The British network presented the sensible argument that arachnids are now setting up home in the UK, regardless of where they are from.

CLICK FOR BBC NEWS VIDEO 1

CLICK FOR BBC NEWS VIDEO 2