World Watch Advisory :: Australia
 

World Watch Advisory
vacationtechnician.com
03/17/04 12:05 GMT

Message One:

Locust infestation expected to increase from March 17 in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia.

Locations affected by this alert: Australia

Massive swarms of locusts, converging on northeastern Queensland and southeastern New South Wales, Australia, are expected March 17 to increase and spread rapidly across the area. Extensive crop loss is predicted as the the locusts devour everything in their path and swarm densely enough to block out the sun across land recovering from a severe 18-month-long drought.

If a swarm is encountered, expect possible transportation delays due to diminished visibility or ground treatment and aerial spraying. Farmers are hoping for dry weather through early April to discourage hatching
conditions. Information regarding plague conditions is available on the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Web site: http://www.affa.gov.au/content/outpu...E06241F418B21A

Message Two:

03/17/04 11:50 GMT
Counter-terrorism units to stage an exercise in Australia March 22-27; disruptions possible.

Locations affected by this alert: Australia

Australian national and state counter-terrorism organizations will stage a five-day security exercise throughout South Australia, Victoria, the Northern Territory and Tasmania March 22-27. The extensive exercise, dubbed Mercury 04, will test new defensive equipment and infrastructive protection against chemical, radiological and biological attack.

While the authorities will attempt to minimize the disruption to normal life, travelers should expect a disruption in services when the exercise is held. Police and rescue units will be occupied and some roads may be closed for a period of several hours, causing congestion and traffic delays. If near the site of the exercise, do not panic and cooperate with police orders.


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Related Intelligence: The Australian police forces are trustworthy, well trained and responsive.
Related Intelligence: Dial 000 for all emergency services in Australia.

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Is someone trying to scare us so they can have Australia all to themselves?
AndrewDavid

Don't worry, AndrewDavid! The locusts will never get as far as Sydney; the cockroaches would eat the lot in five minutes!

Do you notice that the warning mentions that the plague is spreading TO north east Queensland and south-east NSW? That would have to mean that its ORIGIN is just west of Surfers Paradise! Hey, LizF! Are you cultivating nasties up there again?

For all the backpackers - no they aren't talking about those crops. Just unimportant things like food

I was starting to wonder who was responsible for this alarmist stuff - nary a sign of so much as a grasshopper here. Maybe I'm getting paranoid - anyone who's visited the USA board lately might have noticed that it's been plagued by a different sort of pest - a phantom poster who just hates San Francisco and tries to steer would-be visitors off to San Jose (who knows the way?). He (if it's a he) pops up under a string of constantly-changing names, and despite other posters' firm resolution to ignore him he always succeeds in generating huge, furious threads to which he contributes using different names while accusing his critics of masquerading under different names ... it's all quite exhausting. And nobody knows why he's got a bee in his bonnet about SFO.

Anyway, roobar, how do you know the hoppers don't eat that other crop? Are they still flying straight?

"I knew it", when I said " go forth and multiply and enjoy yourselves" I didn't mean that they should eat everything now did I? I said to them, " now that you are a free cockroach, just have a bit of fun before Alan finds out" so what did they do but get all their friends around and have a party!
You see there is not much going on in the news in the US of A and so we had to manufacture something, didn't we? I had an email from my friend in Atlanta saying that she was sick and tired of hearing about Australia - what with all those locusts eating themselves around the eastern states of Oz followed by ""Russell Crow's" film Passion - which, she assured me, she was not going to see because there was something about locusts in the bible and it must have been retribution to Australia for such a dreadful, and gory film!!!!! Well anyway I am sure that she knows what she is talking about but I'll just have to imagine that it must be way past her bedtime at this stage and furthermore senility gets to us all if we live long enough! - eh Alan?????

I don't know where this person is posting from but there was a news article on Wednesday about alocus plague that had hit Dubbo in NSW. Hardly a cause for hysteria or mass warnings to the public, the only people who were concerned about this were the farmers in the central west of NSW.

Serves you right, Liz, for cultivating two consummate locusts!You never know what those blighters will get up to! What did you feed them on: diet Coke?

For what it's worth, the same source posted a warning about floods on the Fodors Africa forum. :)

I like the line "they are recovering from an 18 month-long drought".

I bet many wish that were true!

I think it is a good idea to warn people of anti-terror excercises though. Could be scary watching a bunch of helicopters dropping army personnel in the middle of the city if you don't know what it is about.

The post though seems to be spam, trying to get people to visit their website. The warnings do seem to be "out there" maybe some are relevant but most are paranoid.

Alan, wouldn't it be "consummating 2 cultivated locusts"?

>>>>""Russell Crow's" film Passion - which, she assured me, she was not going to see because there was something about locusts in the bible and it must have been retribution to Australia for such a dreadful, and gory film!>>>>

Russell may have been a bad boy now and then, but getting blamed for bringing Egyptian plagues down on us is a bit much, especially as we all know that it's Mel Gibson who's responsible for the hoppers. And didn't "The Patriot" coincide with the start of Australia's long drought? Anyway, I'm sure we disowned Mel around that time. And for that matter, if Russell Crowe gets to be too much we can always fall back on the fact that he was born in New Zealand.

Alan, you aren't kidding about the roaches. I experienced that firsthand...they were EVERYWHERE in my friend's apartment. If you can't beat em, join em. After a few days, I was naming the roaches and inviting them over for tea.

Ooooo! Crazymina you have some strange friends if they have roaches in their homes. No one need every have them in their homes nor anywhere outside sewers, drains and rubbish tips.
You are absolutely right Neil, but said friend from Atlanta wouldn't know Russel Crow from Mel Gibson and I do think that it was the time we decided that the US could have him back anyway. I thought they could have had him back after Mad Max myself.

Liz
Cockroaches are a fact of life in Sydney, especially inner suburbs, regardless of cleanliness, pesticides, and whatever.... unfortunately!

Sydney cockies seem to thrive on any pesticide known to man. In my youth I rented an almost subterranean flat at the Cross - it looked OK when we saw it in the daytime but soon found out that at night you literally could not see the kitchen ceiling for them. Up here in North Qld the house geckos deal with them most efficiently. There's got to be some "plus" in having cane toads everywhere - they love to snack on cockies.

Goodness me, you poor things.
Doesn't the good old Bi carb do the trick or have you created the World's most resistant roach?

Come the nuclear "experiment", the cockies will survive!

Lost highest mountain and governor; found roaches and locusts.

All is in equilibrium in the island continent.

Andrew David

The things you learn on this board!

Sheesh....I'd stack our US roaches up against an Aussie one any day -- a tough NY roach can be saddled and ridden.

Not to mention Palmetto bugs in Florida and New Orleans. Years ago I stayed in New Orleans, and you know how you "fluff" your sheets and they sort of flutter down on your body? Well, when I did it I distinctly felt something...and a flicked the sheet back and distictly heard something hit the floor! Naturally I couldn't sleep after that, so I woke my husband who spent who knows how much time on his hands and knees with a mini-flashlight looking for the offending critter.

Sure enough....a huge cockroach. Faster than you can say "Wild Kingdom" we, (ok, it was just him, I was on the bed) we trapped it in our lovely plastic water cup. I got dressed, marched downstairs to the desk with my "prize" and presented it to the Desk Clerk who drawled "why m'am, you're just like mah ex-wife...aint nothing but a Palmetto bug which you can find at the Hilton too". Whereupon he took my cup out to the courtyard, tilted it and stomped on it, came back calmly and went back to his Playboy.

Regards,

Melodie3

Maybe as good a time as any to advise unwary visitors on how to eject an Australian huntsman spider - very big, with long hairy legs, scary at first sight, fast runners but harmless enough. Getting rid of one is easy if it's on a flat surface: simply pop a wide-mouthed jar or glass over the beast (avoiding the removal of one or more of its legs in the process); then carefully slide something flat like a piece of cardboard under the spider to trap it inside. Take it outside, up-end the jar and shake vigorously. If you're lucky it will fall out - if not, you could have a very unhappy spider on your hands. I've only met one person who claimed to have been bitten by one (having had a beer or three too many he decided to catch it by hand) and he likened that to being stung by a mosquito. Stomping a huntsman is not in the spirit of fair play.

A huntsman vs. a NYC roach; there's an interesting thought.

I have just finished reading the 100 postings on how to pack light. After all that I now find, as an unwary visitor, I have to pack a wide-mouth jar. Well maybe not since they (spiders) are fast runners you say and I can barely put one foot in front of the other these cold damp days.

Did you notice how you all went off on tangents and made 9841182 look rather ridiculous? I'd like to go off on my own tangent. Talk about two locusts! Have you heard about two silk worms sharing the same cocoon? According to our (China) guide they spin inferior silk which is used for lesser quality items. And for this they give their lives. And tangent number two: is a spider an insect?

AndrewDavid you are insightful indeed. That's what 9841182 is trying to do: have Australia to himself/herself. Well it won't work will it? At least you and I will be there too. And by the way, what countries have you been voting in lately?

See you soon Australia!

My friend told me about the huntsman. I shuddered when I heard about it...and am glad I never saw one!

But you all are right...those roaches are amazing. They would not DIE! I stomped and stomped, and I swear, they just gave me the finger and scurried off.

My friend lives in Elizabeth bay, not far from King's Cross. The customs officer asked me "who lives in Elizabeth Bay?" to which I responded "a friend." He shot back with a "rich friend!" I told him my friend was not rich at all and he was in a studio apartment. He scoffed and informed me that "poor people don't live in Elizabeth Bay."

Well, apparently then these were upper crust cockroaches!

Generally the only Australian spiders that are worth worrying about are (a) funnelwebs (the deadly variety is confined to the Sydney area, but few people ever see one) and (b) redbacks (similar to the American black widow, extremely common under garden rocks and similar habitats but unlike the funnelweb sluggish). The huntsman is just nuisance value. Spiders are arachnids, not insects.

You can now all relax. The terrorist-alert practice which was going to disrupt tourism all over Australia has come and gone, and the news is that relatively few terrorists, or tourists, were actually affected in any way. A few dummy bombs went off in a few isolated areas, but they weren't even strong enough to kill Liz's cockroaches. The locust plague made something like page 28 in the Sydney paper; we have more important things to worry about, such as, will they make another Matrix movie and block off all our best streets again (with all those movie people hanging around, you can hardly squeeze into the dining room of the Intercontinetal nowadays).

Alan,

even more of a concern....will anybody actually be able to figure out the PLOT to another Matrix?

Melodie

And this reassuring letter from a rural resident in today's "Sydney Morning Herald":

"I drove from Dubbo to Parkes yesterday and witnessed the locust swarm, but I think the plague is now over. From the look of my car this morning, I think I got them all."

And a warning to any prospective visitors to the area - Blue Mountains Tourism, after receiving a consultant's report, has announced that the mountains are to be "rebranded and repositioned". Let's hope they don't lose them in the process.

Forgot to mention a story I heard recently about a guy in Sydney who was about to put on his gardening gloves, then worried that a redback spider might have taken up residence. So he put on his lateral-thinking cap and decided to nuke them in the microwave for a while. Opening the door, the first thing he saw was a cockroach walk out of a glove, shake itself off and stalk off.

Alan

Should they "reposition"the Blue Mountains, could you please advise since we will be using your instructions on how to get there.

We're leaving soon. Thanks.

After visiting the Blue Mountains, Mark Twain reported being informed by a fellow train passenger that the mountains had been formed by millions of years of droppings deposited by millions of generations of kangaroos. This accounted for the mountains' characteristic blue colour, produced by the gases released by this material's decomposition. This confirmed Mark Twain's view that it was inadvisable to take much notice of the information offered by locals anywhere.

Mark Twain was a wit as well as being a wonderful writer. Pity there was not more emphasis on Mark Twain in schools here in OZ compared to what we did get to study.

On the topic of nasties in Australia, I have it on the advisory of some esteemed associates of mine from the deepest darkest Africas that Australia is more inhospitable and more of an 'extreme environment' than their land. Scary stuff.

As for the Australian Huntsman Spider, yes, they can be scary, but up north I saw a beach full (cape tribulation, north of cairnes) of spiders measuring up to a foot in size that lived in what I thought was rat boroughs, on closer inspection the hoard of rats that scurried into the holes were spiders. At that point I ran screaming from the scene.

About a month ago there was a female and male hunstman in my study (males are smaller, females are mamoth). About a week into them being inside (hey, I wanted to see what they do for fun) the female ate the male.

This was a bad sign, because it's common after-play in spider sexual encounters. The female dissapeared one night never to be seen again.

Three weeks later, from inside my bookshelf out of sight, has come a hoard of small huntsman spiders, less than a centimeter (1/4 inch) in size. Cute little buggers. The WSPA side of me made me want to save them, after all it's not their fault they happened to be born in an evil human abode.

Thusfar I've rescued about 28 of the buggers. The downside .. I was reading a website the other day ...

The female spider sits on a pancake shaped egg sack of silk for three weeks then the babies hatch with some assistance from mum. During this time and for two months afterwards she will be agressive and attack anything that comes near her nest.

After two months when the babies leave the nest completely she resurfaces to carry on with life as usual.

Unfortunately, it also mentioned how many babies they have .. between two to three hundred.

So .. here I sit at 2:08 AM with a plastic cup and a business card, wondering whether a can of Mortein would be better. But as others have said in these posts, our critters just flick you the bird, lift up their arms and ask if anyone has a loofah they can use during their shower.

I've seen a Sydney roach literally drown in white foam from bug spray rather than have any effect by the spray. Unfortunately due to chemical assaults they have grown quite immune to things we throw at them.

I bet a hundred years ago when our ancestors caught and threw out any bugs inside before the advent of spray didn't have mutant bugs of doom to worry about.

Why, oh why, can't people pay attention to 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' mentalities of ye olde generations?

The reason the giant spiders were running was that a herd of carnivorous pink elephants was in hot pursuit, using a flock of flying pigs as spotter craft. You'll just have to stop smoking those dried cane toad skins.

Neil,
You bit again.
A/D

Can't help myself.

Canberra cockroaches must be a lesser breed - one shot of fly spray and they turn up their toes.

In rereading the original post I note there are some email addresses, websites and "how to unsubscribe" mentioned. The intention is to get the unwary's attention by being outrageous -- although there could be an element of truth to some of it -- and then get unwary to go to the websites, send emails and unsubcribe.

This may well be the intention of the "hoax" poster whose mission is mischief. Our virus protect companies send out reminders on this. Be careful because:

1. you will be providing your email address to an unhealthy mind.
2. you may be inundated with sick spam.

Hi Michi - from someone who can't even spell the fairly simple name "Cairns" I and professes to drive through it at 160kmph I would doubt very much if he's ever been here. Truly, I can see a huntsman spider from where I type - it's no more than 4" across which includes mostly skinny legs and is mildy sitting here hoping a small insect will come its way.

H Pat

I should have said "the intention could be" because I can't say what is true and what isn't, but I have received similar emails that have turned out to be hoaxes (checked out with antivirus websites) and I am very wary.

Just curious if the World Watch Advisory is a legitimate organization and if anyone has emailed or used the website sources quoted. Does the poster ever return to the site with the same name.

Anyway, Pat, 9841182 has provoked you Australians into providing us with some good laughs as a result.

Cheers!

Yes, they're a scary-looking spider but quite harmless. Our resident Huntsman hasn't moved for days. I used to eject them from the house but finally decided it wasn't worth the effort.

xbgtcoupe's motives are known only to himself. As the psychiatrist said of Basil in an episode of "Fawlty Towers", "There's material for an entire conference there".

xbgtcoupe: which website did you read about huntsmans? I've got one with a nest at the moment (they're due anyday now) and I'd like to read up properly on them. Only i can't find anything useful. Thanks.