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Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula: Grammastola rosea
In the Wild
Description:
 Arachnid
o 2 body regions
 Cephalothorax
 Abdomen
o 8 legs
o 8 eyes
 2 compound, 6 simple eyes
 Poor eyesight but can sense movement from vibrations
o Venomous fangs
o Pedipalps – appendages that help with eating and mating
o Spinnerets
 Size: About 4 – 5 inches
 Light brown with “rosy” or coppery hue
o Where the name “Rose Hair” originated
Habitat and Range:
 Chile, South America
o Terrestrial
o Shallow burrows in Mediterranean-type vegetation
Diet
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Insects, possibly small rodents and reptiles
Get most of their water from their food
How they eat
o Ambush; do not spin true webs
o Inject venom from fangs into prey to soften tissue
o Pedipalps help compress prey and squeeze out softened tissue
 Ingestion helped with sucking stomach
Adaptations:
 Grows by molting exoskeleton (called ecdysis)
o About once a year
o Can re-grow lost appendages during the molt
o Will stop eating, then flip upside down before splitting open and emerging from
the old exoskeleton or “shed”
 Defenses:
o Defensive position: rearing by raising front legs
o Flicking “urticating hairs” from their abdomen when threatened
 Not actually hair, called “Setae”
 These setae are very irritating, almost like tiny glass slivers
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Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula: Grammastola rosea
o If necessary, can also protect themselves by biting: venom injected through
hollow fangs, but venom is usually reserved for prey
 Not fatal to humans, but a painful bite!
Lifespan
 Females can live 25 years
 Males live up to 10 years
Ecosystem relationships
 Helps maintain insect/rodent populations
Reproduction:
 Male spiders do not have penises
 They use their pedipalps located between their jaws and first pair of legs and when the
male is ready to mate the pedipalps become enlarged
 The male will release sperm onto a web and use its pedipalps to suck up the sperm
 When it finds a mature female it will insert the pedipalp into the female’s epigyne
(female arachnid genital opening) which fertilizes the eggs
 If fertilization is successful, the female will produce an egg-sac with about 500 eggs
inside
o The eggs hatch about 6 weeks later
Activity:
 Nocturnal
Other “fun facts”:
 There are over 800 species of tarantulas world-wide
 Chilean Rose Hairs of the least aggressive tarantula species
 Fibronin is the protein that makes up spider webbing
 Largest tarantula species is the Goliath Bird-Eating tarantula (up to 11 inches)
Conservation Status and Threats:
 Not Threatened, though sometimes collected from the wild for the pet trade
At the Zoo
Kix
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Sex: unknown
Age: hatched in 2009
Source: purchased from Carrie Murray Nature Center in 2010
Zoo Diet: Crickets and pinkies (mice)
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Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula: Grammastola rosea
What We Can Do
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Make environmentally responsible lifestyle decisions to help conserve habitat –
conserve energy, reduce litter and pollution
Choose your pets carefully, the illegal pet trade threatens many other species
References:
 http://people.ucalgary.ca/~schultz/roses.html
 http://www.critterology.com/rose_hair_tarantulas_or_chilean_rose_hair-192.html
 http://www.oaklandzoo.org/animals/arthropods/chileanrosetarantula*/gy.com/rose_hair_tarantulas_or_chilean_rose_hair-192.html
 http://animalworld.com/encyclo/reptiles/spiders/rosehairtarantula.php#Breeding/R
eproduction
 http://www.zoo.org/Page.aspx?pid=641
 Hancock, Kathleen, and John Hancock. Tarantulas: Keeping and Breeding Arachnids in
Captivity. Taunton, Somerset, England: R & A Pub., 1992. Print.

Buchsbaum, Ralph. Animals without Backbones. Third ed. Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1987. Print.
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