Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Tarantula!

I spent at least an hour flipping cover in a little foresty bit of guana whilst I was there, looking for amphisbeana or blindsnakes to no avail. Two species were very abundant though. One was the cotton ginner (a tiny sphaerodactylus gecko we've featured before). The other was this tarantula.

tarantulacrop

There were absolutely loads of them - sometimes 2 or 3 under each log but they seemed confined to this particular glade - I didn't find any at the higher and drier elevations. The above shot is a crop - the full shot shows that this one had just moulted (which may explain why it didn't run away unlike all the others).

tarantula

This species is actually pretty small compared to most tarantulas - just a couple of inches all in.


6 comments:

Julia said...

That's QUITE big enough, thank you very much! I don't know what it is - I have no problem with the vast majority of arthropods. I've happily held hissing cockroaches and emperor scorpions, which were all much bigger than this chap, but for some reason, eight legs and hair gives me the willies.

This is probably why I coxed a women's eight rather than a men's four at Cambridge *ba-dum tsh*

Anonymous said...

We had a tarantula at the museum where I worked. The shed skin was as scary to most people as the actual spider. Very challenging--sometimes dangerous--for them to shed; getting all those body parts safely out of the old exoskeleton.

Thanks for the in-the-wild look at this! It would be a good entry in Life Photo Meme, as would most all of your posts...

Anonymous said...

THanks both - that Life Photo Meme looks interesting.

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