Talk:Tarantula

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Article Grading: The following comments were left by the quality and importance raters: (edit · refresh) Contents 1 Length 2 Swimming Tarantuas 3 Image 4 thanks for revising my text 5 Picture 6 Unverified name changes 6.1 Funnel web tarantulas? 7 can tarantulas jump? how far? 8 Chicken-eating tarantulas 9 Appreciation for the great work done on this site 10 Refactoring 11 Where can they legally be kept? 12 Natural prey 13 Thermographic Image 14 oh uh, here's an (unverified) anecdote 15 Infobox image [edit] Length It's a bit too long, maybe the taxonomy section could be split. --Sarefo 22:49, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Swimming Tarantuas

can someone plz add a section about tarantulas and swimming? whole research can be found here: http://atshq.org/articles/swimming.pdf --sin-man 05:49, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Maybe we should add a link instead of trying to address the question with a special section. There are some spiders that actually swim. Walking on water does not fit the definition of swimming. The biggest item of interest w/ regard to tarantulas is how large a spider can be and still be supported by the surface tension of the water. "Swimming" in this manner is something that many, maybe even most, spiders can do. One of the ways that I use to try to hold spiders on a little stage to be photographed is to overturn a small bowl in a larger bowl of water so that the spider is surrounded by a moat. It is surprising how many spiders will strike out across the water barrier without any hesitation.

There is a fascinating species (one that occurs in Europe but, as far as I know, not in the U.S.) that lives its life in a kind of silken diving bell under water. Periodically it swims to the top, does a kind of flip, and comes down again with a bubble of fresh air to take into its dome. Those spiders really swim. P0M 18:19, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Image

Can we get a smaller version of the image to put inline, with a clickable link to larger version below it? The current one is way too big to be inline. --Delirium 21:54 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] thanks for revising my text

Thank you two for changing my mistakes and for revising the order to the better. I am dyslectic so I easily make mistakes, but I thought the plural of Tarantula was Tarantulas, not 's. The new order is also better. I added the sub chapter names more as an afterthought, so it need a change of name.

The image was not mine, and I don't have a tarantula of my own, so I can't make a good one and I can't find a good one from the internet that is public domain.

The genus and subfamily list is maybe a bit to long. First I added 25 common genus's, but then I wanted to add the subfamilies and I tried to rearrange the genus's into the families, then I found out that one subfamily (speleo-something) has been removed and the cave-tarantula's had been added to another family. Not sure which Genus's should stay in there. Also the sub-families don't look good in that list, something should be changed about it, but I am nt sure what. User:Magraggae 19:45, 13 Jul 2004 (GMT+1)

Hi, I don't know who changed "tarantulas" to "tarantula's". What you thought is right, so I changed it back.

What is wrong with the image? It is a perfectly normal tarantula, mine in fact.

Ah, I see now. You are looking at Delerium's message, which is about a year old. Don't worry, somebody fixed the image size problem. P0M

One of the people who has done a lot on the Spider article is an authority on scientific nomenclature. He has done a lot to straighten out naming on that page. The problem is that the names get revised from time to time, and if you don't have the latest sources you can easily get an out-dated name. (I started trying to straighten things out before the expert came on the scene, and I can testify that it is a real mess.) Maybe I can get the expert to look at this page. P0M 08:44, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I like the picture, but that text said somethign was wrong with it, so I just replied. Looks good to me. I added the kingdom, phylum stuff. I added the families that I could find out of the most recent information I could find. However I am not an expert, but I think it is pretty recent (this stuff changes so fast because there is soo much we don't know yet). Maybe someone could get some pictures of other more colourfull species as an example how they can also look? lauches hairs into the hair ROFL, thanks for noticing that and fixing it to air :x User:Magraggae 13:25, 14 Jul 2004 (GMT+1)

[edit] Picture

[comment by an anonymous user moved from the article page] The picture to the right is not that of a tarantula, but an enlarged picture of a jumping spider. The person that put the picture of the jumping spider up on this site stating that it is a tarantula is mistaken and is now miseducating the interested masses who are coming to this great site to get good, factual information about tarantulas.

He's right, I think. Sure looks like a jumper; I've removed the image and put it here, so as not to orphan it. -- Hadal 06:40, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You're definitely correct. Probably a Phidippus. The depth of field on the picture is not too good, but it's a good picture because it shows the spider looking around trying to figure out what kind of a critter the photographer is. When I find my big book of Phidippus pix I'll see whether I can pin it down further. I wrote a note on the images page for that photo indicating that it isn't a tarantula. P0M 08:50, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Okay, good to know... The site said to tarantula, so don't hold it against me personally. -- user:zanimum

[edit] Unverified name changes

Please do not change identifications on these pages unless you have done your homework. Somebody changed the identification of the main image to "Chaco Golden Knee...", which is incorrect. See a clear image of that species (same genera as the pictured spider, but with clear "golden knee" bands) by Googling for images, e.g., http://homepage.ntlworld.com/the.tarantula.store/gal-G.aureostriata.JPG P0M 19:38, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The same user has changed the name again. I have communicated with the V.P. of the American Tarantula Society who is a better judge than I (or the other contributor), and his judgment is that any assignment to species by means of a photograph is imprecise. The store from which I bought the spider identified it as G. rosea, and I kept this spider for more than 10 years and saw it under various lighting conditions. I have shared the e-mail message from Mr. Schultz (the aforesaid V.P.) with the other contributor, who has made no reply to my message. Therefore I am changing the identification to G. species as a compromise. P0M 02:45, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

At the risk of offending someone, I'll weigh in on this one. First, it is difficult to make specific identifications of tarantulas from photos, and indeed many times even from specimens! Second, I have compared what I think are the two species involved, based on online photos, in the dispute and can say that while the identification is not certain (dealers often do not really know what they have) the identification of this as Grammostola rosea is as reasonable as one can make. It is possible that it is a related species, but almost certainly NOT the Chaco Golden Knee (also called the Chaco Giant Golden Stripe on the web - common names for tarantulas seem to be very mutable.) In any case, as a professional arachnologist (admittedly a specialist in the Salticidae and "clubionoid" families) I see no reason to avoid calling it Grammostola rosea (which it certainly resembles), or as a compromise, Grammostola sp. I would totally avoid a common name as I really do not think that they are sufficiently stable for that. Tarantulas are hard to identify and I really don't like the tendency to trivialize that issue.User:Richman 11 Apr 2005

[edit] Funnel web tarantulas?

The various "funnel web tarantulas" (such as the deadly Syndey funnel-web spider) seem to also be known as "tarantulas"; yet no mention of them on this page. At least they deserve a mention?

--EngineerScotty 20:51, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Somebody just argued vehemently (on another article's talk page) against calling the "cousins" tarantulas at all. Ideally the Taxonomy box should clue people in, but maybe we need something like the "finder" maps where, in the lower left corner of a map of Nebraska, for instance, there is a little map of the US with a colored spot in the middle to represent Nebraska. The name "Tarantula" originally didn't even apply members of this Suborder, it was the name of a kind of wolf spider. Then it came to be used for the Theraphosidae, and now (at least on Wikipedia) it has been broadened to include about half of the "cousins" of the Theraphosidae. The Germans and the Chinese call the Theraphosidae "bird-eating spiders". I don't know offhand whether they even have special names for the other Families.

One of the things that I have tried to do to make things less abstract is to find pictures that we can use of a representative of each Family. Lucky for me I found an "atypical tarantula" right on my front porch. But there are lot of other Families among the spiders for which nobody has donated images. We're lucky to have a photo of the Brazillian Wandering Spider, for instance, but the copyright owner won't make it available on Wikipedia Commons so I can't put it up on the Chinese spider article. People who own tarantulas as pets, to the contrary, have provided loads and loads of images.

A thumbnail picture of one representative of each of the Families in this Suborder might make a good "finder map" -- especially if we could make the sizes proportional. An "atypical tarantula" is much smaller than any of the Theraphosidae. Maybe if somebody were to provide good drawings of the lesser photographed Family representatives we could get around not having legal photos. (I have a very good Brazilian wandering spider that I copied from a website because I just liked its looks. Now the whole site has disappeared and I have no way of tracking down the copyright owner. That's one of the sad things about the WWW -- books may last for hundreds of years, but a website can disappear and not leave a trace. P0M 00:03, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] can tarantulas jump? how far?

Somebody put this topic up, but didn't sign and didn't say anything about it.

Tarantulas can jump. One of the biology professors at my university has an ultra high speed TV camera with which she has photographed tarantulas capturing prey. I saw one of her movies, the one in which a cricket approached a tarantula from behind. The cricket did not actually initiate contact with the tarantula. As soon as it came fairly near something alerted the spider and she jumped completely out of contact with the floor of the cage, switched directions in mid air, and came down in good position to capture and bite the spider -- all is one smooth motion.

A friend of mine claims, and I have no reason to doubt his veracity, that when he and his girlfriend came back from a hike in the mountains in the southwest part of the U.S. they noticed a tarantula walking across the parking lot. Thinking that it would be a kindness to shoo the tarantula out of harm's way, my friend began to pelt the tarantula with sand or litter from the surface of the parking lot. Rather than thanking him for his good wishes, the spider jumped on his hand (my impression is that it was from a distance of a couple of feet) and bit him. He has long maintained a resentful attitude toward that spider, but I believe that she escaped the scene in the confusion that followed her retaliatory act.

The G. rosea that I kept for a dozen years was incredibly strong for her body weight. Her cage was divided into two areas by a vertical wall pierced by a 2.5 inch hole cut out by a lock-mounting drill -- the kind that leaves you with a circular plug. The wall was made of compressed wood chips, so it was really dense and the plug weighed far more than the spider. But putting the plug back in the hole was not an effective way to keep her out of the second part of her cage. When she wanted to go in there she would just pull the plug out. She moved regally except in the 1/25 second bursts of activity she used to pounce on prey, so I think she had both the power and the speed to jump a fairly great distance. But in all the time I had her she was never motivated to jump.

If you Google "arboreal tarantula" and "jump" you will find several references to the fact that these lighter-bodied tarantulas can jump pretty well.

[edit] Chicken-eating tarantulas

Did anyone else see the Public TV program on the so-called "chicken-eating tarantula" early a.m. on 26 September 2005? Having been bitten by a couple of rather small jumping spiders (for just cause, unlawful imprisonment in fact), I was irritated by the amateur researcher's claim that most spiders are too small to bite, fangs are too short to pierce human skin, etc. (He should examine the fangs of the full-grown Latrodectus mactans on my coffee table. I can see her fangs only under fairly strong magnification. They appear to be at maximum about 1 mm. long. But even he knows that female Latrodectus species spiders all are perfectly able to give the errant human something to think about.)

Anyway, he went deep into the Amazon where he found and photographed one very large spider. The trouble is, it all went by too fast for me to get a clear idea of the spider's size. He was filming in the dark, so the lighting was highly contrasty, lots of shadows. And of course he didn't put her against a white background with an inch grid on it. If I remember correctly he estimated her fangs at about 1/2 inch long. To me, the spider appeared to make a good handfull for him. (He reached down and grabbed it and held it up to the camera.} I found a couple of websites with photos. The article on one website says they meaured a length of 95mm and a leg-span of 250mm. The websites have daytime photos, but nothing to judge lengths by.But a veriaty of Spiders are sold to children with may be moust dangerous if they are not treted propoly and may be venomous if not devenomed it can inject venomis liquid in to the blood stream and can over tiime kill the victom of the bite.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/deepjungle/episode2_nicholas.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/spiderman.shtml

Well, at least he should have been satisfied by now that there is at least one spider in the world large enough to bite -- probably could have bitten through his shoe. ;-) P0M 02:52, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Appreciation for the great work done on this site

I saw this site link as a sample site worth visting link on Wikiproject_Arthropods. It's blown me away. It demonstrates the superiority of the collaborative principle over the single authors principle (Cathedral & the Bazaar, a la Eric Raymond). I just loved it too much and immediately wanted to thank and congratulate you all on behalf of the world! Well done & keep it up! AshLin 03:16, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Refactoring

I've done a bit (OK, a lot) of refactoring on the page; primarily moving sections around. In particular, the bit about the wolf spiders was moved to the bottom; I've tried to make this page primarily about true tarantulas. Other sections have been rearranged to make the article flow better.

I've also tried to clean up some unencyclopedic tone in various parts of the article.

One other suggestion. The German Wikipedia article, de:Vogelspinnen, contains a lot of detail that the English article does not (plus a great picture of a tarantula climbing a glass window). 'Twould be great if someone, der besser als mich deutsch sprechen kann, could translate the German text into here. I attempted a translation of Ornithoctoninae but it needs work.

Hope folks don't mind.

--EngineerScotty 18:10, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Where can they legally be kept?

This article does not provide any information on where in the world Tarantulas can be kept as pets, does anyone have any information on this? Night Bringer

Keeping them is legal in most parts of the world; though importing them may be trickier. I know they can be legally kept in most of the US; I can't really comment about anywhere else. --EngineerScotty 05:14, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I think I remember a discussion on a tarantula list-serv that was started by somebody in Australia (?) who complained that he had a widow spider in his house, didn't want it to be where his kids could get bitten, did want to study it, but was forbidden by law from putting it in a bottle.

There are restrictions of some sort on who can keep certain kinds of invertebrates in Florida. You can find Todd Gearheart's commercial site (he sells tarantulas and other spiders, etc.), and read his limitations on the sales of certain items. (It's also one of a very few sites that give information on which spiders have bites that will set you back a bit, spiders he won't sell to juveniles, etc.) If I recall clearly, people have to have a license or a certification to keep certain kinds of creatures -- probably they are worried about introducing new things into their ecology.

More and more tarantulas are being classified as endangered and are, or will soon be, available in the U.S. only through captive breeding programs. P0M 16:12, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Natural prey

Under the section "Habitat and behavior" I expected to see what the various species of Tarantula eat in the wild. -Wfaxon 01:56, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I suppose something might be added, but as far as I know the tarantulas will eat just about anything that moves and is in the right size range. I haven't tried it myself, but I have read that if a minnow is put in a tarantula's water bowl she will capture and eat it. Many people feed their tarantulas the occasional new-born mouse, and some spiders have even been called "chicken-eating tarantulas." I saw the TV program by a supposed expert. He said many things that I didn't agree with, but he did travel to somewhere in S. America (?) and visit a village where "chickens" were supposedly carried off by tarantulas. I got the impression that the demised were not full-grown Cornish game cocks or anything of the sort. Maybe baby chicks? But, anyway, the only insects that are disliked by most spiders are ants, and then there are some ants that are the special prey of some spiders. Many spiders eat bees despite their lethal venom. Many wasps collect spiders for baby wasp food, and I've read that the spiders seem to be hypnotized (?) by the wasps, i.e., they don't avoid them as one would expect.

I can't imagine tarantulas eating fruit flies. They would be much too small to capture. It would be like a human trying to catch a rat in his/her mouth. You could do it, but only if the rat was drugged or something.

What I have noticed is that arboreal tarantulas seem to be much more interested in moths than in crickets. Conversely, a burrow-dwelling tarantula would be unlikely to find many butterflies walking around on the ground in front of its burrow.

Except for cases where spiders have prey for which they seem to be especially adapted or there is at least some word of mouth preference (Huntsman spiders are said to snack on cockroaches and to be welcome in homes for that reason), I haven't ever seen much written on their natural diet.

Web weavers will eat anything that is not so large that it can break out of the web. Some of the Nephilla have such sturdy webs that they can catch and eat sparrows or other small birds -- or maybe they just kill them to protect their webs from further damage.

I haven't heard of spiders eating snakes, lizards, or slugs. P0M 03:36, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

They will eat small lizards. Aboverepine 23:53, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

There are a few genera of spiders that have particular prey preferences, but tarantulas seem to be satisfied if it is about the right size and is moving. P0M 00:55, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thermographic Image

Variations of this image keep getting added with no context, explanation, etc. I've been removing b/c they are disruptive to the article. I'm not opposed to this (or some version of it) being added, but it must be made to fit into the article. What information is it adding or enhancing? What is it supposed to tell us about a Tarantula? Aboverepine 16:09, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] oh uh, here's an (unverified) anecdote

From Austin, Texas: http://austin.craigslist.org/rnr/209754888.html

[edit] Infobox image

I replaced Image:Tarantula.jpg in the infobox -- this quality of this image is too poor (blurry, and has weird artifacting around the spider's body) to use as the lead image. howcheng {chat} 21:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC)