Tarantula Collecting in the 1970's

[cantthinkofone]

Even if it was an odd interest, or at least a novelty, it still was a cool hobby. Once again thanks for sharing this. Really is an incite into what the hobby was like "back in the old days".

 

[Snakeshack]

Wow, that takes me back. In 79 I visited California from New York for the summer and I took a trip from Palo Alto to South San Francisco to get my Brachypelma smithi. I took her on board the plane with me in a fruit cup along with some more fruit in a camera case. The guy in x-ray just gave me a funny look and said I had some strange food. I named her ET for enormous tarantula. That got me into them.

 

[Nosokomos]

Poec54, I enjoyed your post.

I also became introduced to Ts in the later 70s and was it ever a different hobby then. Yes, B. smithis were the spider back then, I had a horde of them and they cost so little. Didn't know any breeders in those days and didn't have the internet for info or to connect to other like-minded individuals. I lived in a small town and had to drive across the river to another state to visit the pet shop that carried 8-legged critters.
I moved to Arizona and then I could actually find them in the desert. Wow!
Then, back to the Midwest. I kept them for a few more years and then dropped out of the hobby for quite some time.

Now, I'm recently back into the pastime again. And it is amazing how things have changed. It's a whole different scene. So many new breeds available that I knew nothing about. Slings everywhere! Websites galore! What fun! I was considered "the spider guy" back in those days but I am learning so much now that it's like I knew nothing.
I rescue them from the road and let them go where they can be safe (I'm in Texas now). I'm doing my part to educate some youngsters that are interested (not all of them are). There's a picture on my wall of a beaming 5-year-old that is gentle enough to handle a mellow young A. chalcodes but smart enough to realize that even I won't handle half of my pets--they are not all the same. He's perfectly happy to admire an big stretched-out ornata from the safe side of the glass, but still proud that he got over his initial fear and held a "nice" tarantula. I have a feeling that some of the slings I have may end up in his hands when he's old enough, he's good with animals and his mom is okay with it...
...and they just keep coming! I'm breeding crickets and dubias now just to keep up.
I've missed the little beasts. It's good to be back...

 

[Poec54]

Always nice to hear about the history of the hobby! It really has come along way!
Thanks for sharing Rick!
-Chris

I'm still amazed how far it's come from it's humble beginnings. I could never have imagined it would have caught on like this, or that there were so many great species.

The first tarantula I saw was as a child, at the Detroit Zoo. They had a small building called the Nature Center, that had an assortment of small, strange animals on display, including a B smithi. That was all it took for the fascination to start. My mom, always an animal lover, tried to get a job at the zoo back in the mid 1960's, but was told 'We can't hire women', but in the process she met some of the keepers and curators, who became good family friends. I spent a lot of time behind the scenes at the Reptile House as a kid. I even went on a few 'collecting trips' for local snakes and turtles with one of the keepers.

This was still going on when I got into spiders, and was asked if I wanted to be featured on a local animal show that was filmed at the zoo, called 'At The Zoo with Sonny Elliot.' He was a local weatherman, and also did this nature show on the side. So one entire half-hour episode in the mid 1970's was about me and my spiders, filmed in the back of the Reptile House. I think I was still in college and had long hair. I wonder if you can get a copy of it.

 

[Tongue Flicker]

I'm just glad that prices are cheaper now than most

 

[klawfran3]

Wow, that takes me back. In 79 I visited California from New York for the summer and I took a trip from Palo Alto to South San Francisco to get my Brachypelma smithi. I took her on board the plane with me in a fruit cup along with some more fruit in a camera case. The guy in x-ray just gave me a funny look and said I had some strange food. I named her ET for enormous tarantula. That got me into them.

thats a genius idea! It's amazing what you could get away with before 9/11

 

[Oreo]

Very interesting background info! I wonder if anyone has any live specimens now from back in the day. Maybe a long-lived brachy/grammie species.

 

[Shrike]

Very interesting post! Thanks for sharing. The hobby has come a long way

 

[Poec54]

Very interesting background info! I wonder if anyone has any live specimens now from back in the day. Maybe a long-lived brachy/grammie species.

With spiders being almost all w/c adults back then, even the slowest growing would have died of old age a decade or two ago.

 

[Emotionlessness]

Wow shows how far behind my pet shops in my town are, P. irimina, 2 G. rosea, A. geniculata, A. avic, H. lividum are the only Ts I have seen in 4 years and I have had them all lol.

 

[MarkmD]

+1 Brilliant thread/posts poec54, I remember the hobby was very slow in 1997 (in my area only had 3 LPS in a 35+ mile radius) so cant speek for the rest of the UK/US etc, but had limited demand for OW sp cause minority was NW, then in early 2003-05 a boom of new species came in both OW/NW and wealth of info that almost didn't exist before had flooded the market in both breeders/hobbyists then demand for the colourful pokies/Avicularia/baboons etc, plus demand for Stans TKG was more common for all keepers.

 

[LordWaffle]

This is quite a lovely link to a past I will never know, but wish I could. Thanks for sharing this wonderful bit of information.

Gonna be real honest here. It's not a time I'd like to have known. I got into tarantulas with my friends in the early/mid 90s when I was 10-11 and the selection back then was vastly different from today; and still much more diverse than what Poec had available. I'll take the exciting variety and ever-expanding availability we have now to all NW all the time any day.

That said, it's a great post. Always like to hear what keeping Ts was like in different eras.

 

[viper69]

8) Avicularia avicularia - ....had to keep all the slings as no one else wanted baby spiders.

So amazing to read that now because spiderlings are the dominant developmental stage sold now, and even more so because it was an Avic, though I'm biased towards them Back then, the only Ts I knew about were terrestrials from Mexico, the southwest USA and the Goliath Birdeater.

 

[viper69]

this is probably a stupid question, but when was the first official instance of keeping tarantulas at a pet? surely there had to have been a pioneer that brought these things into light, right?

At least since the 1960s as that was when a Prof of mine started keeping a female B smithi that lived 28+ yrs

No doubt someone did it before him of course

 

[Stan Schultz]

this is probably a stupid question, but when was the first official instance of keeping tarantulas at a pet? surely there had to have been a pioneer that brought these things into light, right?

Just catching up on my peripheral reading...

There is no "official" record of the first serious tarantula keeper or the tarantula that was kept. But, tarantulas have probably been kept, at least temporarily, as pets for millenniums by little boys trying to scare their sisters, or impress their buddies. And doubtlessly, many early naturalists kept them as curiosities in their labs or homes. Almost every nature book dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had to at least mention them.

But, the first real book, The Tarantula, dedicated to them was written by Dr. William J. Baerg and published by the University of Kansas Press in 1958. And, I consider the official date for the beginning of the hobby to be the publication date of Baerg's little book. Fitzgerald Publishing republished the book in 1997.

Copies of the Fitzgerald edition and even the original 1958 edition are still occasionally available in the used book trade. See Abebooks and Alibris, for instance. And lastly, print-on-demand copies are also available. When ordering any of these compare publication dates and the publisher's name to make sure you get the edition you're looking for.

The next book after Baerg's was apparently Dale Lund's All About Tarantulas in 1976. Thereafter, for a couple of decades somebody seems to have published a new tarantula book about every month or so!

By that time, thousands of tarantulas a month were being exported legally or otherwise from Mexico, Central and South America alone. While African species were sometimes available, Asian species were almost as scarce as tarantula's teeth for several decades. The only Asian species available during the early years was a large black tarantula called "Siamese earth tiger," "Asian black velvet," or something similar. It was later identified as Haplopelma minax, but now the correctness of that identification is being called into question. After so many thousands of years the hobby finally came of age. We even began to argue over their correct scientific names!

Wow! Whodathunk?

In 1985 Brachypelma smithi was listed in Appendix Two of the CITES Treaty, and in 1995 all Brachypelma were added. These two acts more than anything else stimulated the captive breeding of tarantulas. In the following years more and more enthusiasts have taken the challenge of breeding these large fuzzy spiders, and now there are probably more captive bred and raised baby, spiderling and juvenile tarantulas sold in the hobby than wild caught individuals.

And that begs the additional question of hybrids. ([size=+1]NO![/size] DO NOT EVEN THINK OF TURNING THIS THREAD INTO A DISCUSSION OF HYBRIDS! OPEN YOUR OWN THREAD!) Because the hobby is breeding so many different species it is inevitable that hybrids by one cause or another should occur and even get into the pet trade. Two examples that are often mentioned are interspecific hybrids within the genus Avicularia and within the genus Brachypelma. There are even a few intergeneric hybrids between some Brachypelma and some Aphonopelma. Like it or not, the 21st century is upon us!

Some very interesting data that seems to be missing is how many different species (or should I say "kinds?") are now routinely available in the hobby and how many are captive bred and raised. A full listing by scientific name and/or common name (wherever and whichever are available) would also be exceedingly interesting. I have my hands full with other matters, but perhaps another enthusiast with too much time on their hands would be kind enough to search through the last few year's price lists to generate reasonably accurate answers for these questions.


And the saga continues...

 

[3skulls]

Great read!