Wholesaler workers in Germany called the cops after this large, scary spider turned up in an imported container in the third such incident in under a month.

Police in the northern German city of Bremen were called out to a warehouse in the Horn-Lehe neighbourhood after a worker spotted the large creepy-crawly scuttling up the wall of a container that had been shipped in from the Chinese city of Ningbo.

Officers secured the 20-centimetre- (8-inch-) long spider in a cardboard box before delivering it to a local vet.

Bremen Police spokesman Nils Matthiesen said in a statement on 14th February that the arachnid was a banana spider, which is the name given to several aggressive and highly venomous species.

However, veterinarian Alexandra Doernath, 51, later cast her doubts on this claim, with the Bremen vet telling the German daily Bild: “It’s neither a banana spider nor a tarantula. And whether the animal is actually highly poisonous is also questionable.”

The latest incident is the third in a series of scary spiders turning up in German warehouses in the space of under a month.

The first large spider, with the likeness of a skull on its back, was found in a box of bananas from the Dominican Republic by supermarket workers in the city of Krefeld in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia on 31st January.

It was identified as a Heteropoda venatoria, commonly known as a ‘pantropical huntsman spider’, ‘giant crab spider’ or ‘banana spider’, due to its occasional appearance in marketed bananas.

Though it is not deadly, its venom can result in a painful bite.

And the second large arachnid was found by supermarket workers in the town of Rees, also in North Rhine-Westphalia, on 3rd February. It was also found in a box of bananas from the Dominican Republic.

According to the Kleve District Police Department at the time, “the animal was probably a venomous banana spider”.