Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula Facts

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to tell you a little bit about common animal that we'll find in the pet trading. This is the Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula. Scientists refer to it as Grammostola Rosea and like the name implies, you'll find him originally in the scrub lands of Chile, especially in area called the Atacama Desert. And the Rose Hair Tarantula gets his name on the males have a, a pink rose color, right here on a part of the their body called the cephalothorax, that's where the head and the thorax if fuse together. You can see he's got a pair of spinnerettes coming from his abdomen here. And if I move him over, let's see if we can get him to go after something he'll eat in awhile. They eat small crickets and other invertebrates and he senses the vibrations with those hairs. So let's see if he'll take some prey. He may have done a little too work to after, to go after the prey. These spiders are common prey for lizards and other small mammals, birds and so forth. And what they'll do has a defensive behavior, when they feel threaten, they'll wear up on their back legs and they'll extend the front pedipalpis, the front pair of appendages, they'll extend their fangs in a warning. But if that doesn't work, they'll often flick this irritating hairs, called urticating hairs off their abdomen. Let me turn him around so you can get a good view of the spinnerettes. And I'll try to, get the web and here we go, get a nice strand of web, coming out. Now unlike a group of animals called the true spiders, these animals, chelicerae or fangs are arranged to move up and down, like this. True spiders, like black widows and the latrodectus will have their fangs arrange to pinch on the sides. So these are very primitive form of the spider family. They evolve before the true spiders did and this is the Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula, another amazing terrestrial invertebrate."