Animal Encounters I

Hello readers!
Today's post will be a special edition! Every Saturday, I'll try to take some pictures from the zoo and I'll post them here. And I'll start to give my 10 cents or 10p worth. So welcome to the first part of Animal Encounters! For today, I'm honoured to have as my very first guest:

The Chilean Rose Spider

This is Bella (means beautiful lady in Italian). She's a Chilean Rose Spider from...Chile! She's from the Tarantula family and she's about the size of my hand. If you observe her closely, she's got a reddish tinge to her, hence the word 'rose' in her title. Besides having eight legs, spiders have an exoskeleton, that means their skeletons are on the outside. We humans have our skeletons on the inside, hence the word endoskeleton. She has two little black structues behind called the spinnerets, where the silk comes out from. In the wild, they spin their webs on the ground, not in the trees as they're too heavy to be jumping about. They've got their own little hole in the ground where they spin their web about. Any insect walking near the hole will step on the web, triggering the vibrations. They'll then jump out of the hole to ambush their prey, sinking their huge fangs in to the prey. Their venom does two things: it kills the prey, and it contains some enzymes which digest the insides of the prey into a mass of globbery fluid. Hence a spider sucks it food up, it does not chew its food.

Whoa!

Over in the zoo we feed Bella crickets and very small children......and in the wild they eat insects like grasshoppers, crickets, and so on. The larger tarantulas are big enough to hunt birds...whether they really eat (or suck) the bird up is a mystery to me. I always get asked some standard questions: Is it poisonous? Answer: All spiders are poisonous. They need it to kill their prey, unless you come across a vegetarian spider...... Question: If it bites me, will I die? Answer: No, but it'll be painful......just like bees and wasps stings, if you're allergic to it, you could develop swellings and go into shock.

Oh my, what big fangs you have!

Also, again observing closely, you can see that Bella's pretty hairy. She's able to flick those hairs into the air when aggitated. And when those hairs get into your eyes, they can cause blindness. Mostly they tend to get into noses and skins, which will then proceed to cause massive irritations. It is a self defence mechanism to deter larger predators. What other facts can I say? Well their blood is blue and their piss is colourless. We've got four Chilean Rose in our collection, Bella, Xena, Gabrielle, Flossie. They're all lovely females. Females tend to be larger and live longer. By the way, never ever pick up spiders in the wild! In other words, don't try this at home kids!

So, thats about it folks! Tune in next week for another exciting edition of.....Animal Encounters!