Comments on: Chicken-Eating Tarantula Discovered

By: sausage1

sausage1 — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:17:02 +0000

Agreed, Daledrinnon.

By the way, sausage is my little girl’s nickname, and I am here to tell you that she is braver about spiders than I will ever be.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Thu, 10 May 2007 02:46:31 +0000

Anyway, I don’t know a whole lot about tarantulas, so this has been an informative and educational post! Thanks for everyone’s contributions!

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Wed, 09 May 2007 16:35:04 +0000

UKcryptid- Ok, I’ll be difficult too. You said in your above post that some species of spiders are known to hunt in packs on their mutual webs, so if tarantulas are not a true spider, then that doesn’t apply as giving the pack hunting theory any weight. Anyway, I know what you meant, and trying to find paralells in similar creatures is important here.
I agree that to someone seeing two spiders go after the same prey, it may appear that the two are coordinating their efforts. So what was a chance occurence becomes an imagined new behavior. But I am a little confused by the author’s approach to this alleged new find. If this guy wanted to approach this from a scientific perspective, I would think he would want to observe whether this pack hunting is a common occurence before turning a possible chance happening into some sort of new behavior. Same with the frog. The way this report is written is very misleading as it seems to point to all these behaviors that have not really been properly studied as far as I can see from this article.

By: UKCryptid

UKCryptid — Wed, 09 May 2007 16:01:24 +0000

Oh, just to be difficult, remember that our friends the tarantulas are not ‘true’ spiders One way to tell the difference is the fangs and how they’re used.
I personally think the whole pack hunting idea would come about in much the same way as the frog in the hole at the same time etc, simply by chance. If two tarantulas see the same prey and both want it, they may well go for it at the same time. To somebody looking for a new species all this could be very exciting and thus you may declare that they cooperated to kill. Also, someone mentioned above that they wondered if the measurement was leg span or body length. It is leg span and I to have also seen same size/larger… In my own collection. One thing i remember from the program though is that he stated the largest one he found was a juvenile, not adult. Which would throw the story of the ‘mother and babies’ thing out the window. Not sure on that though.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:19:26 +0000

Anyway, as many here have pointed out, a lot of assumptions may have been made by the author about the frog in the hole and the “pack hunting” behavior. I would think that more of a reasoned, scientific approach would have been taken by someone who is so apparently involved with finding new types of spiders. I would think that this person would have been able to ascertain different possibilities for what he was seeing rather than report a new chicken eating spider that hunts in packs and keeps frogs as pets.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:14:45 +0000

Kittenz- It’s funny you should mention the spider in the kid’s ear because I just read a news story about that very dilemma. Is that the story you are referring too? That story was pretty horrifying, although harmless in the end. All I can say is, fuzzy wuzzy or not, I know I would freak out if I found one of these scurrying about my room at night!

By: TheHunter

TheHunter — Wed, 09 May 2007 12:44:59 +0000

The author did not miss the mark far when he reasoned that the frog was there to eat ants, I have owned several tarantulas and their scat attracts ants like sugar candy. The frog most likely was not a “pet” and most likely was a poison dart frog (very unpalatable even for a big spider) most likely this was a symbiotic relationship born out of the frog seeking food and the spider being unable to eat it due to the poison or if I may leap into the realm of speculation, a relationship of tolerance due to the frog eating the ants that will kill a tarantula and its young. The picture closely resembles a Venezuelan bird eating tarantula; not uncommon and it is not very uncommon for them to grow to very large sizes, I admit I have never heard of one going 10″ before but as far as where the jungles of South America go, well we don’t know every species much less sub species. Also as far a pack hunting, not likely; tarantulas are very much loners, with the exception of the arboreal species such as the pink toe. The pack assumption was most likely from the fact that some tarantulas (the bird eaters included) have in fact evolved to have large, almost fully developed spiderlings which gives them a better chance of survival when they do leave home. This was hit on by Aaronious which was a very astute observation; hooray! someone that does not let “icky-icky-poo” close their mind to one of the most fascinating and beneficial creatures to roam the planet.

By: satarina

satarina — Wed, 09 May 2007 11:49:01 +0000

Man, I’d rather find a bloodthirsty chupacabra in my yard than a huge freakin’ spider the size of a dinner plate that HUNTS IN PACKS! As happy as it makes me on an intellectual level that this, if real, is a new species, my non-rational phobia is making me slightly nauseous at the thought. one of the few times I’ve found myself hoping that a story like this is fake.

By: kittenz

kittenz — Wed, 09 May 2007 11:28:50 +0000

At least the darn thing is too big to live in a person’s ears!

By: springheeledjack

springheeledjack — Wed, 09 May 2007 04:52:48 +0000

Thank you Loren Coleman. Now it is going to be at least another hour in my home before I can get to sleep because I had to read the article