One woman in Queensland got quite the surprise when cutting her freshly bought supermarket broccoli. Tamahra Moore, 32, said that while chopping her broccoli on Sunday, she spotted a fully-grown redback spider which gave her the shock of her life.

"I was chopping all my vegies up for the week when I saw a flash of black and red, the bloody thing just crawled out," Moore said.

Moore carved the stem off and placed the florets into a plastic container and returned it to Coles in North Ward.

"I called the supermarket so they could go check the rest of their stock and they didnt believe me so I took the container in and the ladies on the front counter freaked out," she said.

"They got the produce manager who said he had heard about it but had never seen it."

Queensland Museum principal spider curator Dr Robert Raven said pictures of the mature redback showed it "looked ready to dro eggs" and could have caused a "serious envenomation".