Facts About a Tarantula

Video Transcript

"Spiders can be pretty scary but one of the scariest kind of spiders I can think of is a tarantula. I'm Janice Creneti and this is facts about tarantulas. Well, Tarantulas are a group of organisms called arthropods, let's even back up a little bit arthropods are invertebrates. Invertebrates are animals that don't have back bones. There's no bones inside them to give them their structure so instead they tend to have hard outer coverings sort of like a thickened skin like you'd see on a turtle but, made of different substances. Well, Tarantulas are a group of invertebrates called arthropods. They're called arthropods because they have jointed legs. In fact on this picture you can see the different joints in the legs because they're spiders they have eight sets as opposed to insects who only have six. Tarantulas are very hairy, that's one of the characteristics of tarantulas and they also tend to be some of the largest spiders that are out there. Tarantulas can be found in trees on the ground they make webs, they can make webs, they can capture their prey in a variety of ways. One of the things that's unique about the group of spiders the Tarantulas come from is that they're actually with mouth parts able to inject poison directly into their prey, which is another method of digesting them. Now some tarantulas are very popular in the pet trade and they're not all dangerous to humans. So even though tarantulas look scary a lot of people choose to have them as pets. My name is Janice Creneti and this is facts about tarantulas."