JANE and ERICH

STILL OUT THERE

So here we are again. Erich's been locked in a cupboard for months, griping like mad, so I'm letting him out for a bit. He dug around in some old photos and picked this one because it makes him look like 'the main man' It was taken in Kruger National Park on a really hot day. Over to him.
"Hey, any of you spot what's wrong with this pic? Trick question - you'd need to know spiders really well to get this one. That scary dude on my head? A tarantula. A real, live tarantula, from the Amazon jungle. So, duh, they don't exist in the KNP. (Bet you thought it was a baboon spider! Close enough, same family - Theraphosidae - plus about 898 other similar species. How d'you think they got that number right? Did they catch thousands of big, hairy spiders all over the world, put them all in a line and say "Yeah, this one's this one's cousin, nah, that's something else, wait - here's another one!" ? Jeez. Glad I wasn't in that room!)

Neat thing about them is that they can regrow lost limbs - awesome! Like a gecko does with its tail.
Anyway, this chap on my head was someone's pet. He kept it in a perspex box, and had to catch live crickets for it every day, then one day he announced 'it had disappeared'. Reckon he got tired of catching crickets, and left the lid off its box, 'cos it sure as heck couldn't lift the lid on its own. And if it couldn't adapt to Kruger, it would soon have starved to death.
My message? Don't keep exotic pets. It encourages the trade in them, and there might not be many left in the wild. Actually, don't keep anything that has to live in a box away from where it belongs. Yikes, I've rambled on. Jane's telling me to shu..."