Goliath Bird Eating Spiders are the largest Tarantula species in the world. As you can imagine we were very excited when our large female Henrietta produced an egg sack!
It was the start of November when we first noticed that Northampton Reptile Centre was again going to be proud parents to more of our animals. From the beginning Henrietta was an extremely protective mother, anybody brave enough to venture near her enclosure was swiftly met with impressive aggression.
At the start of January we were worried that the egg sack hadn’t ‘hatched’ yet and knew that we needed to see if there was a problem. Taking an egg sack from a 10″ Tarantula is not for the faint hearted! Bribing Henrietta with a small pinky seemed to distract her as a long (very long!) pair of tweezers carefully removed the egg sack.
The problem was clear, Henrietta had produced too much silk around her eggs and as the spiderlings hatched they were not strong enough to escape from the egg sack. We teased the silk open not knowing if any of the spiderlings had survived and was delighted to find 52 healthy babies!
So far the baby Goliaths have shed 4 times and are growing rapidly. Many of our excited customers gave the new arrivals a good home leaving us with 12 to grow on. We can’t believe that such a formidable mother produced such cute offspring, they are a pleasure to have in the shop.
