By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Spider fan Bill Craft and his wife Becky have an agreement.
If he keeps his pets confined – with a rock weighing down the lid after escape artist Hairy Houdini fled three times – no problem.
"If the spiders get out, I have to find them," he explained at Patrick Hamilton Middle School Thursday. "If she finds it first, it becomes a greasy spot on the carpet. She'll do the ol' stomp and grind" on them, even though he paid $25 for the jumping black rain forest spider with pink toes and $15 for the pinkish rose hair desert pair at One Stop Pet Shop in Cassopolis, which is now in the process of moving to Dowagiac in The Marketplace adjacent to the doughnut shop.
The Craft "menagerie" also includes two dogs, a cat and four fish.
He's seen spiders fetch as much as $999 on the Internet.
"When I saw the price, I just kept on clicking," he said. "The one I would love to get is the Mexican red leg," but "their numbers are decreasing."
By a show of hands, most in the class casually kill spiders they encounter, as Craft, a 1982 Union High School graduate, once did.
"Before I bought my first one in 1990, I used to kill spiders on sight. I used to do the old stomp and grind like everybody else. Then I got hooked on them and I have not purposely killed any. House spiders at my house have a free pass. The wife sees them, she yells at me. I go running across the house, pick it up and put it outside. I play with wolf spiders on my deck."
"How many of you like mosquitos, ticks and earwigs?" he asks. "Every time you kill a spider, you're letting all those bugs go free. Spiders are the good guys in nature. If a spider bites you – no matter whether it's a tarantula or a house spider – it's because you scared it, not because it wanted a piece of you. Without spiders and other creatures keeping the insect population in check, insects would overwhelm us."
But spiders do bite. "That's the best reason anyone ever has for being afraid – especially ones as big as (the three tarantulas) I have today."
A fourth one is tattooed across his chest.
"I'm not afraid of spiders, lizards, snakes or scorpions," Craft said, "but let a house a spider fall on me and surprise me and I'm going to scream and jump like a little girl. I'm sure a lot of you are afraid of spiders – the unknown. You're not familiar with something like this."
"I'm not here to scare you," he reassures students assembled in Abbi Wegner's classroom. "I'm here for everybody to learn more about them," so those who want a closer look crowd around the terrarium.
Those who fear them gape from a safe distance away.
"Tarantula" applies to more than 800 species of large, hairy spiders in every shape, size (from a couple of inches in diameter to a dinner plate-sized 18-inch legspan) and color – gold, black, brown and cobalt blue, Craft's favorite hue.
"Nobody has ever died specifically from a tarantula bite," Craft said. "If anybody has a bad reaction, it's because they're allergic to insect bites. If you're allergic to bee stings, you'd have the same reaction to a tarantula bite. It's the same type of venom."
Besides hair, exoskeletons characterize tarantulas. To grow they must shed their hard shells. Some change color each time they shed their "skin."
Females are larger than males. Females lay 500 to 800 eggs at a time because in the wild "they're not sure how many are going to survive. After they mate, the male has to move very quickly because he becomes food," Craft said. "If I put the pink toe in with the rose hair, more than likely the pink toe would be eaten. If I took the divider out" separating the similar-sized rose hairs, they would probably fight to death.
Pink toes are more communal. Several could share a cage so long as they were the same size.
Students knew spiders possess eight legs, but they were less sure that they also have eight eyes. "They can see 360 degrees all the way around their bodies," he said. "But they can't see very far. They don't have any ears, so yelling doesn't bother them. To 'hear,' they sense movement. That's what the hairs on their bodies are for. Any quick movements freak them out. If you trap a wild animal, it's going to attack."
The ground-dwelling rose hairs lack "grip" on their feet, so he must be careful not to drop them.
"If I drop it, there is one soft part on the body of the tarantula, and that's the abdomen, which holds all the organs – the lungs, heart, stomach. It's been compared to a paper bag full of Jell-O. If you drop it from this high on a hard floor, it splats. My first spider, Hairy Houdini, the first two times he got out, he went down two flights of stairs into our living room in the middle of the night, stopped two feet from the TV and started watching. The third time, he took a right too soon and fell three feet onto a piano keyboard" and met an abrupt end.
He replaced it with a second Hairy Houdini, but this trio is too new to have earned names. He had one for eight months and got the other two a couple of weeks ago.
When a spider rares back on its hind legs with its front legs up, "It's not in a good mood. Somebody's going to get bit and it's not going to be the spider," Craft said.
Showing a shed skin of a Mexican red leg, Craft notes, "They shed everything, even the eye coverings. They move like backhoes or bulldozers. This is the world's oldest hydraulic system, right here. Legs are hollow and move by increasing and decreasing the pressure of fluid inside. If it survives having a leg broken off, the next time it molts it will regenerate those legs. They'll squeeze the new spider out of the old skin like taking a hand out of a glove. It takes about 20 minutes. They spin a mattress underneath them because the exoskeleton is still soft. While that shell is hardening, they stick very close to the old skin, so it looks like there are two spiders to mess with."
He picks up tarantulas by scooping beneath them and letting them crawl onto his hand. He displays them to the children by turning the spider's mouth and fangs toward his skin, so "if anybody is ever going to get bit, it's going to be me, although I've had them 17 years and I've never been bit."
Or, it can defend by shedding hair on the abdomen. "If you get those hairs in your nose or eyes, it will burn and itch for a few days, like a really bad allergy. If you went home with a rash from touching a tarantula, your parents are going to freak out a lot worse than you and they'll be calling the school, so I can't let you touch them."
His daughter Samantha, 10, who attends Sister Lakes School, has been holding tarantulas for three years. Son Will, 5, is eager.
"I've got to wait a couple more years until he calms down a little bit. I have one rule about owning spiders: If I cannot hold it, I don't want it," Craft said.
The pink-toed spider dwells in trees and can climb any surface. They spin webs on their glass walls they use as ladders. When one escaped he hunted for three days. When he finally gave up ever finding it, there it was curled up in the toe of his slip-on shoes, like a piece of wadded-up tissue paper.
Tarantulas live "anyplace it's hot all year 'round" – Africa, Asia, South America, Mexico and the southern border states – Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and southern California.
"A teacher here used to live in Arizona," Craft said, "and he will verify that during mating season they come out by the thousands. If you're driving down the highway at night, it can sound like driving over bubble wrap as they pop. I'd like to buy a calm Grand Canyon black from Arizona."
"My first one, I saw in a pet store. I thought it looked cool," he said. "Not only that, but I saw the reactions of other customers and how freaked out they were and that just made it look cooler. I bought my first one in Michigan City and I was hooked. I have not been without a spider for an extended period of time since."
Tarantulas mainly dine on crickets, which also have exoskeletons.
"They're about 90 percent fluid," he said. "They pierce (the shell) with their fangs and suck the juice out."