One quiet night in Australia, Andrew Mcleay headed into his garage for a quick trip to grab something from his car. What he wasn’t expecting was a heart-stopping encounter hanging just inches from his face.
As he opened the car door, he spotted what looked like two enormous spiders — each about 5 inches across — clinging to the sunshade.
Startled, Mcleay froze.
“I had no idea what was going on at first,” he told The Dodo. “I thought maybe they were fighting.”
One spider appeared limp, while the other looked like it had claimed victory. But just as Mcleay was piecing it together, the “dead” one started to move — and the top one didn’t.
That’s when he realized: it wasn’t a battle. It wasn’t even two spiders. It was one spider molting.
Unknowingly, Mcleay had walked in on the rare and vulnerable moment when a huntsman spider sheds its exoskeleton — a natural but seldom-seen process of growth.
After a brief (and slightly terrifying) pause, the freshly molted spider began to lower herself away from her old shell using a thin silk thread. Mcleay, recovering from the shock, grabbed a bucket.
He carefully relocated both the spider and her old exoskeleton to his garden, giving her space to recover and continue her life outside the car.
Though huntsman spiders are harmless to humans, their size and speed can give just about anyone a scare. And for Mcleay, that eerie moment is not one he’ll soon forget.
“I check the car every day now,” he said with a laugh. “If I see another one while driving, I might cause an accident.”
