tarantula

We all know the stories about tarantulas, the movies show giant spiders that can cause death with one bite!  But have you ever thought that maybe these spiders are gentle giants?  The word tarantula came from Southern Europe where people believed that the vary large and hairy spiders that lived there were dangerous.  They gave this spider the name, tarantula.  What these people were actually dealing with was the wolf spider.  The wolf spider is from the genus lycosidae which is related to the tarantula's genus theraphosidae, but is not the same.  People eventually immigrated from Southern Europe to the Americas where they found large hairy spiders that had similar characteristics, behaviors, and habitats that the wolf spider in Southern Europe did.  They mistakenly thought they were seeing the same spider that had terrorized them back home.  The name tarantula was brought with the new immigrants and was given to an entirely different spider.  Yet the name was adopted and used by general population of the Americas, and it is still widely used to describe very large, hairy spiders throughout the world. - vf