Tarantula

The word tarantula applies to two very different kinds of spiders. The spider that originally got this name is neither particularly large, particularly hairy, nor particularly venomous. Its scientific name is Lycosa tarantula, which makes it one of the wolf spiders. Its name comes from that of Taranto, a town in Southern Italy. The bite of this spider was once believed to cause a fatal condition called tarantism. The cure for the disease was believed to involve wild dancing of a kind that has come to be called the tarantella. Actually, the bite of this kind of spider is not even particularly painful, let alone life-threatening. There appears to have been an entirely different kind of spider in the fields around Taranto that caused fairly severe bites (one candidate is the malmignatte or Mediterranean black widow, Latrodectus sp.), but the tarantulas, being wolf spiders, were fairly large, out in the open, and were frequently seen running around, which drew attention to them, and so they got the blame. Join that factor with the belief in tarantism and the supposed need for wild dancing to prevent sure death, and the fearsome world-wide reputation of the tarantula was guaranteed.

When people who knew about the tarantulas emigrated to the Americas and discovered fearsomely large and hairy spiders in the New World, they bestowed the name "tarantula" on them. Those spiders belong to the Suborder Mygalomorphae, the Family Theraphosidae and the Family Dipluridae. They can be quite large.

The body of the Rose Tarantula from Chile (Grammastola spatulatus) pictured here is approximately 2.5 inches (6.2 cm.) long. None of these fearsome-looking creatures make the list of deadly spiders, and this particular kind of tarantula is regarded as being especially docile. Some people claim, without identifying specific spiders, that there are deadly varieties of tarantulas somewhere in South America. Perhaps those people have misidentified the dangerous Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria nigriventer) as a "tarantula" because it is fairly large (about an inch long), somewhat hairy, and is regarded as aggressive.

Some species of tarantula are kept as pets.