Spider man and his pet subject-1/98/97-BY Thea Jourdan
THE pregnant Goliath waits patiently in her glass enclosure. Very soon, her satsuma-size abdomen, sustained on a diet of raw meat, will spawn hundreds of tiny spiders. "I'd love to enter her in the Guinness Book of Records," says Dr Robert Bustard, a tropical ecologist.
"I'm going to persuade them that they should decide the world's largest spider by weight not leg span."
Despite her somewhat stumpy limbs, the tarantula is enormous, weighing in at five and a half ounces.
Lumps of half-digested cow's heart lie around her tank. Goliaths, which eat small birds and rodents in the wild, feed by salivating on their prey and then sucking up the juices through a hollow mouthpiece.
"Isn't she beautiful?" asks the scientist. The mother-to-be's multiple eyes glint in the low light. Bustard's rambling Victorian home in the Perthshire village of Alyth is testimony to his passion for tarantula spiders - and one of the centres of excellence for the increasingly bizarre and lucrative exotic pets market, which has just seen a Kirkcaldy pet shop criticised for selling baby crocodiles. Bustard has bred thousands since 1990 when he returned from 19 years of living in Africa, Asia and Micronesia. His arachnophilia was born of necessity.
"I was working on sexual selection in crocodiles in India and the Gambia but when I moved back to Scotland to see my daughter through school, I was faced with a dilemma," he explains. "You can't keep crocodiles here so I decided to keep tarantulas instead. They have similar sexual habits and are much easier to look after."
He insists that his interest is purely scientific but it is hard not to get the impression that tarantulas are the central focus of his life.
As we enter the warm kitchen -kept at a sub-tropical 75 degrees Fahrenheit 24 hours a day - spiders are everywhere. Dozens of adult tarantulas are stacked on the kitchen draining board and beside the cooker. A discarded spider skin lies on the kitchen table and a silver-toed Indian Ornamental broods in a sugar jar. Bustard explains that he has moved them in outhouses in the garden so that he can breed them and "pot on" the babies.
Outside the kitchen, more crowd the hallways and perch atop the furniture in the sitting room, each in a tiny transparent box. Inevitably, a few run free. Bustard has no idea how many spiders he now owns. "I sometimes find one of them walking around the house. They are all over the place." Even the more conventional family pets are getting used to the eight-legged invaders. "I came into the kitchen the other day and saw the cat lying by the Aga next to a tarantula," recalls Bustard. "They weren't a bit bothered."
Tarantulas, like humans and crocodiles, choose and spurn their partners. "A spider must woo his mate. If they don't find each other attractive, they won't mate."
One-sided romance can be particularly dangerous for the male, usually significantly smaller that the female. "I had an adult female that I wanted to breed. The first male that I introduced into her enclosure, she attacked and bit through his carapace. I rescued him before she could eat him but he bled to death. With the second male, she was putty in his paws and I obtained a superb mating right away."
Bustard is one of the top commercial tarantula dealers in Britain.
The income he makes from the sales offsets some of his research costs.
Tarantulas can cost from £ 2 for a young red knee to £ 60 for a sexually mature female Goliath.
Apparently, they are not difficult to keep. A glass cage with a sawdust base and a piece of tree bark is enough to keep most perfectly happy. An adult can eat three crickets a week but doesn't need to be exercised or watered.
Bustard is dismissive of fears that tarantulas are dangerous. "When someone shows you a dog, do you ask, 'Does it bite?' Some dogs do but most don't. It's the same with tarantulas." As if to prove his point, he cradles a venomous Mexican red-legged tarantula in his bare hands.
"I've never been bitten," he says proudly, turning the beast upside down and showing its enormous fangs. "I don't like house spiders actually," he whispers, as we part. "If I find one in my bath I have to call for someone to take it away. I'm frightened to death."
Copyright 1997 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
The Scotsman
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