A Long Island couple was grossed out to find a dead spider inside a sac attached to a banana purchased at a local supermarket.
Venus Vanglad says she bought a bunch of bananas at a supermarket in Bay Shore last week. The fruit sat in the house for about three or four days before her husband took one to work as a truck driver in New York City.
That's when he spotted a large white sac coming out of the overripe banana.
"He thought it was tissue at first," she told News 4 in an email.
Her husband used a knife to cut open the sac, and out came the dead spider.
"I was gonna eat this banana!" he could be heard exclaiming to another person in cellphone video provided to News 4. "It was, like, stuck in the crack or something."
Vanglad said she didn't notice anything unusual on the fruit when she purchased it at a King Kullen supermarket. She spoke to a manager at the store after the discovery of the spider, and they offered her to pick out a new bunch. She said she declined.
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A spokesman for the supermarket said, "We sell over 100,000 pounds of bananas a week. Very occasionally, something like this can happen with fruit that comes in from a tropical country. Even though the fruit is washed before it is shipped here, we always recommend that shoppers rinse off their produce."
Last year, a Staten Island family found a sac containing a live spider on a banana imported from Chile, according to Staten Island Advance.
The newspaper notes that entomology researchers at the University of California at Riverside find that it's not unusual for an occasional spider and egg sac to appear in banana bunches imported from South America.
"They are not considered very dangerous and should not cause concern," the website says.
