SHELBY TOWNSHIP, MI - At first, the mom thought she was seeing a big tangle of string in her toddler's bedroom. Then she realized it had eyes. And it was alive.

A giant Huntsman spider - one of the largest spiders in the world - had somehow crawled into her Shelby Township home and Wednesday morning was sitting in the room where Jillian Duke's 21-month-old son slept and played, she told WXYZ in Detroit.

"I went to go reach for it and I kind of backed up and I said that's just too much string," she told the news station in an interview.

She dropped some books on it, then called her husband and parents as reinforcements.

The family later contacted a pet store that specializes in spiders, she told WXYZ. They consulted entomologists at the Cranbrook Institute of Science and determined it was a Huntsman spider.

Named for its speed and the way it catches its prey, Huntsman spiders are native to warmer climates like Australia. They are not considered aggressive to humans or poisonous.

It's unclear how it ended up in Michigan.

In recent years, Michigan has seen some warmer-climate spiders set up shop here and create breeding populations, like the brown recluse.

Found this MONSTER furry spider in my sons room this morning 😲😳😭 Thank God my daddy came over to get it out. Mind you,... Posted by Jillian Duke on Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Last year, a video taken in Queensland, Australia of a Huntsman spider carrying a mouse up a refrigerator got a lot of attention: