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.