Darla... coming home soon

Meet my new baby, Darla, a red toy poodle (though many say she's not really red).

New member of the family

got him/her this morning..

my first aboreal..

haven't got a name yet..

There's a spider in my thumb

there's a spider in my thumb (sing in the tune of Plants vs Zombies theme: there's a zombie in my lawn)


Itchy - the shy one
Brachypelma Albopilosum (Honduran curly hair tarantula)
prefers to hide under the tunnel I made for her.. sometimes it feels like I'm actually keeping coco peat as my pet
(coco peat - substrate; if fishes have pebbles in the aquarium, tarantulas have substrate in the terrarium)



Stan - the celebrity
Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens (Venezuelan Green Bottle Blue Tarantula)
everybody loves her colors and everybody is asking if they could have her.. sorry guys


Geenie - the temperamental one
Acanthoscurria geniculata (Brazilian White Knee Tarantula)
largest one I have. Devours prey like crazy.. never misses to bite the brush I use to push prey in the terrarium. she's quite shy in the picture, just a day after coming out of a molt
(molting - process where tarantulas shed off their exoskeleton... time when they seem to grow bigger :) )

Chaco - mr goody two shoes

Grammostola Pulchripes (Chaco Golden Knee Tarantula)
never gets on a striking pose, never kicks hairs, almost always walks to my hand whenever I open the enclosure

(kicking hair - tarantulas tend to kick their back part to fling hair to potential predators, hair can be very itchy, similar to the itch you get with "higad". tarantula hair can cause skin irritation also known as T virus)

Meet the Coke family

John Coke (american), Sittichai Coke (thai), Coke Hiroshi (japanese), and Noor Suhailah Coke (malaysian)

Still looking for the others...

coke is life!

Breakfast dessert

one of the very few things I look forward to when going out of the country.

Japan


Singapore

Tarantula handling

You may have seen Geni from my last blog entry.. The little crawler proved to be one of the most temperamental of my three tarantulas. She can go from "you-can-poke-all-you-want-but-i'm-not-moving" to "i'm-not-taking-my-fangs-off- your brush" in less than 50ms. Luckily, I haven't been bitten...yet. Worst I had was the T-virus -- an skin irritation due to the tarantula abdominal hair flicked in the creature's defense.

here she is in her defensive attack pose

After wrestling her around with a brush, shaking her enclosure, and showing her who's boss, I was finally able to muster enough courage to let her crawl up my palm.

You can see she has grown a bit form the last time I posted a picture of her -- a good inch and a half arachnid.

After the photoshoot, she calmly goes back to her enclosure without even thinking of biting the brush.

Itchy, Scratchy, and Greedy Geni

Meet my new pet.. "Greedy Geni", a Brazilian whiteknee tarantula (Acanthoscurria geniculata).

She comes with 2 cousins, "Itchy" and "Scratchy", a Honduran Curly-Hair tarantula and a Chaco golden knee tarantula. Unfortunately, Itchy and Scratchy are a bit too small to see yet.




They came in 50ml deli cups but i decided to relocate them in clear glass enclosure made of CD cases glued using Tamiya cement.