Some more on tarantulas

 

First of all, with my ignorance, I gave you some bad information. I said I thought this was a female. In fact, this is a male, which is shown by the black color of the inner sides of the legs. So this one is the one who, when it is mature, will go off looking for a female, which it will mate with, then die. So I would rather have had a long-lived female. But the good side is that this male is only half-grown. We recently found a wandering male run-over dead on the road, and it was twice the size of my pet.

This species, which looks so formidable, doesn't bite. You can put it on your arm and it will just walk harmlessly along it (admittedly it feels a bit weird). On the other hand, if you attack it roughly it will rapidly use its hind legs to scrape hair off its abdomen. The fine hairs (called urticating hairs) will break up into a cloud of floating bits of hair that are very irritating if they get into your eyes or nose.

When we first moved to Tucson a couple of years ago, I began photographing every spider we found in the house, and I would try to identify them later. One day I found three or four small spiders in the bathroom, all with the same marking, an abdomen split in two, black on the back half, pale on the front half. I photographed them but never found out what they were. One day I was reading something about tarantulas, and there they were, baby tarantulas, and I was sorry I had not taken clearer pictures of them, and especially sorry I did not try to raise one of them.

The mother tarantula lays its eggs inside her burrow, and keeps them there for a while. Then when she thinks the time is ripe, she opens the burrow, and the young stride out one by one and march off across the desert, evidently a wonderful scene if you have the luck to witness it. I have no idea how these got into our house and ended up in our bathroom. If I had photographed them more carefully you would see the black half of the abdomen was made up of the already fully formed urticating hairs they would use for defense