The Jamberoo Action Park, New South Wales, is home to a world record holder spider. The enormous spider, which holds the Guiness World Record of Largest Spider Sculpture, sits at the exit of one of Australia’s largest water rides.
The Big Funnel Web Spider is a female model of the Australian native species, found mostly in New South Wales. It was made in Malaysia from steel, fibreglass, and concrete. The Big Funnel Web Spider claimed the world record title, initially held by Maman, another spider sculpture in Canada.
Size and Features of the Big Funnel Web Spider
The spider stands 19.7 metres high, approximately 3.5 metres shorter than the Great Sphinx in Giza, Egypt, built around 2500 BC. It covers 22.2 metres in width and 15 metres in length. Additionally, each of its two fangs is 3.5 metres long.
The size of a real funnel web spider ranges between 1 and 5 centimetres, and the females of this species are said to be bigger than the males. To put this into perspective, the Big Funnel Web Spider is 420 times bigger than the average female species!
Maman, the previous world record holder for the title, was only 36 times larger than the biggest real bird-eating spider, yet the model only measures half the size of Big Funnel Web Spider.
The sculpture weighs 7.5 tonnes, while its supporting steel frame consumed 52.8 tonnes of concrete. All these specs explain why it took 12 months to complete its construction, which began in 2014.
There are many Big Things in Australia sculpted into models of insects. A few examples are:
- Big Ant in Broken Hill
- Big Ant in Poochera
- Big Bogong Moths in Acton
- Big Bee in Kingscote
The Big Funnel Web Spider is not the only Big Thing with a Guinness World Record. In Cobar, New South Wales, the Big Beer Can scooped the title of the world’s biggest of its kind. The gigantic beer can holds 22,000 litres of real beer.
