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Monday, Sept 4th, 2006
I know not everyone loved Steve, but we sure did. While reading the headlines on the internet news, I recognized a name that I never thought I would see in a situation like this... Well, this way at least.
Our famous Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, was killed today while filming a documentary on our deadliest creatures in the Great Barrier Reef. He apparently swam too close to a large stingray, spooking the beast, and in the process the creature whipped it's tail, tipped with a poisonous barb that can reach up to ten inches in length. The stingray caught Steve in the chest, missing his ribs an piercing his heart. Steve was pronounced dead a short time later in the presence of emergency teams. We will miss you Crocodile Hunter, though stupid some of your actions were, you are still one of the bravest and greatest heroes of our time.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Steve Irwin Killed by Stingray
Steve Irwin, full coverage on Yahoo! News
Spider fan makes pets out of pests
By Jeff Himler
Staff writer
Blairsville Dispatch
Friday, October 28, 2005
INDIANA--If a spider sat down beside her, Trudy Long wouldn't mind.
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But, since she joined the staff of an Indiana pet shop offering many exotic species, including arachnids, her attitude toward the creepy-crawly creatures has softened.
"When I was younger, I never liked spiders," Long said. "I grew up on a farm where there were all kinds. You just stepped on them and got rid of them."
Now, instead of putting her foot down on the web-weaving intruders, she's more likely to invite them to stay for a spell--provided they mind their place.
"They get to grow on you," she said of the unusual pets, noting she's had as many as 10 at a time--mostly tarantulas-- sharing her home.
Some are her personal pets. Others she's raised for Mike Pearce, owner of Pearce's Pet Place.
Except when the object is to produce a new generation of spider offspring, each remains tucked safely away in its own glass or plastic enclosure.
That policy cuts down on aggressive encounters between the tarantulas and also protects them from Long's five dogs--a chihuahua, a chihuahua mix and three lab mixes.
"As long as they're not out of their cages, crawling around, they're fine," Long said of the spiders.
If she happens upon other stray spiders which don't particularly interest her as a pet, she now makes an effort to catch them and release them outside--instead of exterminating them.
Long's grown daughter, Jo Anne, helps around the store and is the webmaster for the business. She doesn't mind snakes, but does not share her mother's regard for spiders.
"I don't like any bugs," she said, pointing out her mother "transformed my old bedroom into her bug room."
Long acknowledged spiders and other less-than-cuddly creatures don't appeal to a majority of pet owners.
"My brother calls me 'Twisted Sister' because I like bugs," she admitted.
But she's not alone. She indicated Pearce's store had an inventory of 35 spiders last fall, but only a handful now remain to be claimed by new owners.
"A lot of times, parents will buy them for their kids," she said. While some college students "want them to freak out their friends."
But, "If you're just going to get a spider to scare someone, don't do it," she advised.
Long noted spiders are "an easy pet to take care of. There's no expensive food."
Like fish, that makes them well-suited for apartment dwellers who want a low-maintenance, low-impact pet, she said.
Long simply provides each pet spider with three live crickets per week, and water in a small basin--or in a moist sponge, which the creature can drain with the help of its fangs. She lines the cage with a mixture of soil and bark.
"Spiders don't need a big pen, but if you give it to them, they'll use it," Pearce said.
"People don't like them because of all the myths about them," Long said of spider.
For instance, most varieties of tarantulas sold for household pets have venom which will cause no more problem to humans than a bee sting.
Pearce usually brings docile Rose Hair or Red Knee varieties of tarantulas along with a python and other exotic pets he exhibits in educational programs for youngsters.
When the tarantula gets its turn, amid the "oohs and aahs," he noted "Most of them want to know, 'Will it kill you?' "
In their years of handling spiders--23 for Pearce and eight for Long--neither has been on the receiving end of the animals' venomous fangs.
"I've probably played with more than 100," Pearce said.
But the furry tarantulas do have another defense mechanism. "With their back legs, they brush their hair into the air," he explained. "It's itchy"--especially irritating to predators, which might think twice about their meal choice.
Unlike in many other animals, male tarantulas typically are smaller than their female counterparts. And their lifespan usually is much more brief--as short as a year, compared to as many as 20 years for a female.
That's why, unless the owner is interested in breeding his own spider colony, females usually are preferred as pets.
Red Knee tarantulas from Mexico sport a reddish-orange color on their appendages, second only in visual impact to the Fire Leg variety.
"I like the Red Knees," Long said. "They're a big, docile spider, and they look pretty cool."
Long's spider collection once boasted a female Fire Leg spider, but she gave it to a former co-worker.
"It has brilliant red legs," she said. "He tells me it's five to six inches in diameter now. I wish I'd held onto it."
"The Red Knees are the ones most people would prefer to have," Pearce said of the different tarantula varieties. But he's found that the more subtly shaded Rose Hair tarantula is more in demand, because it is priced more reasonably.
Originating in Chile, "It gets this iridescent, rose-type color," Pearce noted.
Another species Pearce has tried is the Cobalt Blue tarantula.
Long noted, "Their body has a blue glow to it," but, she's found, "They're the meanest spiders around. They race up at you when you open their cage."
Additional arachnid varieties Pearce has handled include brown recluse and trapdoor spiders and the infamous black widow.
The latter spider's venom, though minute in quantity, packs quite a punch. It can affect systems throughout the body--causing death in no more than five percent of untreated victims, when it paralyzes the muscles needed for breathing.
Unlike the desert-bred tarantulas, "starburst baboon" spiders hail from a rain forest, Pearce said. "They're like greased lightning," quick to make a break for it when he opens their container to clean it or add some food.
In addition to insects, tarantulas in the wild may eat small frogs. Long and Pearce sometimes feed theirs a mouse which is just a few days old.
Someday, Long would like to own one of the largest tarantulas, the goliath, which can grow as big as a large dinner plate. But they're expensive to obtain and difficult to handle. "They're aggressive," Long said.
When Pearce ordered a goliath for a customer, Long witnessed its ravenous feeding habits up close: "We gave it a small mouse, and it just pounced on it."
Long is most fascinated by the intricate webs spiders spin.When she encounters spiders in a natural setting outside her home, "I'll sometimes catch bugs and throw them into the web and watch them wind them up," storing the prey for later consumption.
Since she feeds her indoor pets a steady diet of crickets, they don't create such extensive webs.
Pearce pointed out all webs are not alike.
"Tarantulas don't do webs for catching bugs," he said.
But, he explained male and female tarantulas each produce a specialized web as part of their mating ritual.
The male spider makes a web to help transfer his genetic material prior to mating, while the female rolls a web around her fertilized egg sack in order to carry it with her while her thousand or so young are preparing to hatch.
Long has witnessed the moment when a clutch of baby spiders emerge: "Each of the babies is about the size of the tip of your pen."For the small Orb spider, Pearce noted a web can serve as a form of transportation--not unlike the "Spider-Man" superhero character from the comic books and movies.
Outside his store, he's witnessed a spider migration method known as "ballooning." Each of the young spiderlings would spin a long string of gossamer material which, like a parachute, would catch the wind, raising the spider aloft.
"That was the neatest thing I've ever seen," he said."
In addition to the tarantulas she brings home from work, Long enjoys scouting her rural property for other varieties.
"I look for weird spiders," she said. "If you're lucky, you'll see a wolf spider"--known for the female's unusual practice of carrying its newly hatched young on its back. She once found an unknown spider inside her house that intrigued her: "It had a tiny body about an inch long and legs about three times as long."
But, before she could identify it, she had to let it go.
She explained, "My grandson once caught a toad and I told him to let it go outside." So when the youngster made the same argument about her new spider, she had to set it free, as well, to appease the youngster.
One spider trait that was a surprise for Long and Pearce was their ability, like snakes, to periodically shed their skin.
Pearce noted, when tarantulas are younger and growing more rapidly, they may shed their skin once a month. Older spiders tend to leave their furry outer casing behind twice a year.
After they molt, "You have to wait a couple of days to feed them, so their exo-skeleton can harden up again," Long said.
Also, she's found, "If the female sheds her skin before she lays her eggs, that's not a good sign" for a successful clutch of young to result from the process.
According to Pearce, the molting process not only assists a tarantula's natural growth. It also allows the spider to regenerate damaged or missing legs.
"Each time it sheds its skin, the leg will be a little bit longer, until it's back to normal," he said. That resilience doesn't extend to the spider's central body.
Pearce explained, "They don't have a coagulant in their blood." So, "If they jump or fall from a height, they'll pop their abdomen and bleed to death."
In addition to spiders, Long has sometimes populated her "bug" room cases with millipedes and scorpions. Like spiders, scorpions have an exoskeleton, which molts, and mostly eat insects. And, Long noted, the power of their venom also has been much overrated.
An allergic reaction among some people is the main concern.
As pets, Long and Pearce favor the large Emperor scorpion, which is most docile and less likely to strike with its stinger. It hails from the forests of Africa.
It can grow to about six inches in length, living in captivity for six years or more.
One trait which gives scorpions their own unique visual appeal: "They fluoresce under black light," Long noted. "That's how they catch them in the desert."
The fluorescence occurs in a thin layer of the exo-skeleton. Some have suggested it serves as an ultraviolet light sensor for the scorpions, which are nocturnal and shun the sun's rays.
As for millipedes, "They're just neat, with all those legs," Long said.
Despite the name, none of the 10,000 known species of millipedes has more than 750 legs, arranged in pairs.
According to Long, the giant millipedes she favors can grow up to 11 inches long and live for three to five years.
She feeds them tropical fruit and the lettuce off her lunchtime sandwiches, among other things.
"They love zucchini," she observed.
She pointed out, "If you give them fruit and veggies, that gives them enough moisture. You don't have to have a water dish in their cage."
Millipedes lack either fangs or a stinger. Long has found, when handling them, their many legs "nip, but they don't hurt."
If threatened, the millipede may release a mildly toxic secretion, which can cause a mild to severe allergic reaction in humans handling it.
In the past, Pearce and Long have provided spiders, millipedes and other "bugs" for Fear Factor-style competitions staged by a Pittsburgh radio station during the Halloween season.
The "easy" challenge for the contestants, Pearce noted, was keeping their head inside a box containing a tarantula. "Everybody passed that part."
An event more harrowing, especially for the squeamish, required blindfolded contestants, using only their mouths, to pick out plastic insects from a container filled with real bugs--including cockroaches, crickets and millipedes.
For the event, Pearce "smeared Vaseline around the edges of the container, so they couldn't crawl out."
Long was angry when a contestant bit one of her millipedes in half, killing it.
While the Halloween competition was staged under controlled conditions, Pearce warned against irresponsible handling of exotic animals. He related the unwise decision of a local party-goer who, on a dare, placed a tarantula inside his mouth.
"That's going over the line," Pearce said. "It liked it there and wouldn't come out," using its multiple legs to stay put.
He said, "They blew smoke into the guy's mouth, but nothing would make it come out. Finally, they put some 'Old Granddad' (whiskey) on the roof of his mouth and that chased it out."
When Long's pets pass on to that great web in the sky, she breathes new life into their remains.
Despite having no formal training in taxidermy, through trial and error she has perfected her own method of preserving and displaying the dead bodies of her spiders, scorpions and bugs. She began by simply preserving the shed skin of a Mexican Fire Leg spider--by spraying it with several light coats of a clear lacquer paint.
But she's found working with the actual remains yields a more realistic facsimile of the living creature.
When one of her spiders expires, Long dries out and shapes the corpse, placing it carefully in a bed of special sand used for drying flowers. She noted the hind end of many spiders tend to shrink after death. "I've injected them with wax to pump them up." But her millipedes have been next to impossible to preserve: "When one dies, it's just a big hollow tube. As soon as you touch it, it falls apart."
Initially, she encased her preserved pets in plastic and presented them to friends as gifts. She explained, "People would say to me, 'I'd like to have one, but I don't want a real one.' "
More recently, she's begun arranging them in larger shadow box displays, adding colorful sprigs of artificial moss and dried leaves. "I did some spiders from my yard, but they're hard to work with because they're so tiny," she said.
The more substantial tarantulas offer more possibilities for fixing them in different poses and settings.
Adding variety to her display, she's also included dead moths, butterflies and dragonflies she's discovered while roaming over her property.
The arrangement is accented with smaller pill bugs and shiny, gold-colored "death's head" beetles.
"With the dragonflies, I can fix their wings, but the tails tend to break off," Long said. Large and pale, "The Luna moths are the most difficult to find."
The name tarantula has come to be associated with any large, hairy spider.
But that label actually derives from a particular hirsute arachnid--today recognized as a type of wolf spider--which became an object of fear during the Middle Ages in southern Italy.
The fur-covered spiders were named for the town of Taranto, whose residents reportedly were suffering an epidemic of poisonous bites from the animals.
According to tradition, the only cure for the potentially fatal disease was for the sufferer to complete a prolonged, energetic dance, which would rid the body of the venom through profuse sweating.
The dance, which included spinning and jumping, was known as the "Tarantella."
Many discount the whole story as a hoax. Others argue that the phenomenon was real, but they point to the actual culprit as the less visible, more potent Mediterranean black widow spider.
Jeff Himler can be reached at jhimler@tribweb.com or (724) 459-6100, ext. 13.
Suspect who hid pet store gators in pants pockets to face charges
