Tarantula

Type Of Animal

Tarantulas are arachnids. They are not insects. They have eight legs, not six, and only two body segments. 

Size Of Animal

The largest tarantula is the bird eating spider. They can be 10 inches wide! Some tarantulas can be as small as one and a half inches wide.

What It Eats

Tarantulas eat insects, small frogs, lizards, baby mice, birds and even other tarantulas. They are carnivors, or meat eaters.

How It Captures Prey

Tarantulas do not spin webs like other spiders do to catch prey. Tarantulas hunt at night on the ground. They stalk their prey, slowly creeping up and then quickly leaping onto the prey and then sticking their furry fangs into it.

Venom is pumped in, making the inside of the prey liquid, and then the spider eats it, like bug soup!

How It Protects Itself

If a tarantula feels threatned, it can kick hairs off its body into an enemy's face. Those hairs contain venom and make their enemies itch terribly. Their main enemy is a type of wasp which paralyzes it with a sting. Tarantulas spend most of their time hiding. They can run pretty fast, too.

How It Protects Itself 

Tarantulas are the biggest of all spiders. Most have fangs. Tarantulas have eight eyes, but poor eyesight. All tarantulas shed their skin, called exoskeletons. This is called molting.

Other animals like snakes do this, too. Tarantulas bites are not dangerous. For most people , tarantula bites are no worst than a bee sting. Tarantulas have rectractable claws just like cats.

Female adults can grow back a leg if they lost it in a fight. Sometimes they make a hissing noise by their legs together. Tarantulas live alone, usally in a cool, dry hole in the ground.

The first known tarantula was found in Italy and people believed, incorrectly that its was very dangerous. They invented a dance, the tarantula, to ward of the illness. The truth was that there were other really dangerous spiders, like the black widow, that would bite and make people sick

They were small though, so people didn't think they were dangerous. They thought the big, hairy tarantula must be the one that caused the illness. Some people keep tarantulas as house pets!