Chilean Rose Tarantula

• GeneralOne of the commonest tarantulas in vivaria, for its calm temperament.
• Females can live more than twenty years, while males barely exceed five: they die soon after reaching sexual maturity.
• It defends itself by flicking a cloud of urticating hairs from its abdomen with its hind legs, which cause intense irritation to skin and eyes.
• It can go months without eating, especially before a moult, normal behaviour that often alarms the people who keep them.
• It is probably the commonest tarantula in the pet trade, largely because for years it was collected from the wild on a huge scale.
• Females can live twenty years or more; males far less, dying shortly after reaching maturity.
• It has a reputation for being placid, but it is also famous for its hunger strikes: it can go months without eating with no visible loss of condition.
• It defends itself with urticating hairs that it flicks off its abdomen with its hind legs.
• Its taxonomy has been a tangle: it has accumulated more than a dozen synonyms, among them Grammostola cala, G. spatulata and G. porteri, some of which still circulate in the trade as though they were separate species.

Habitat & environment

Arid scrub and semi-desert

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammostola_rosea