Warning: if you have arachnophobia, don't watch the above video.
Posted on YouTube earlier in the month and going viral this week, the brief clip features a “huge wolf spider” that meets a dramatic end.
“We got a bit of a surprise when I squashed it with a broom as hundreds of baby spiders came crawling out of the mother,” wrote the uploader, Danny Ford, who claims to have shot the video in Hallett Cove, South Australia.
Actually, the babies most likely didn’t climb out of the mother, they climbed off the mother, says Norman I. Platnick, a spider biologist—aka arachnologist—with the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
It’s hard to tell what species of spider is seen in the