This beautiful (and very hairy) spider is an adult female METALLIC PINK TOED TARANTULA from Colombia and some of its neighbouring countries in south America.  There are many different species of pink toed tarantulas living in various south America countries as well as on some of the southern Caribbean islands.  As you can see they get their common name 'pink toed' for obvious reasons! 

My thanks go to Jaide, of Year 4 at Haydon Abbey Combined School in Aylesbury, for thinking of the excellent name 'Angelina' during my visit on February 25th 2010!  I had been struggling to decide on a name for this lovely spider and this was a great idea from Jaide linked to the popular children's cartoon character Angelina Ballerina, due to her feet looking a bit like Angelina's pink ballet shoes!  Thanks again Jaide, a very good choice!

Pink toed tarantulas are arboreal spiders, meaning that they live and hunt in trees rather than on the ground.  For this reason they have much larger foot pads than terrestrial (ground-dwelling) tarantulas, to allow themselves to grip securely to the trees in which they live.  These can be clearly seen in the picture below:

Angelina is the first arboreal tarantula I have ever kept despite having admired them for many years in the collections of friends.  It is amazing how different they feel to handle compared to terrestrial tarantulas as their big feet feel so grippy or sticky as they walk over your hands!  

I personally find it fascinating to watch pink toed tarantulas moving, and the lovely Angelina is no exception!  They are capable of very quick darting movements but when they walk slowly, as Angelina does, they lift their front legs very high into the air as they walk - much higher than is required to simply step forwards.  This is because like all tarantulas they use the very sensitive hairs on their legs to detect changes in their environment including movement through the air. 

Any air blowing towards them is detected by the hairs and the spider has to decide if the movement of air represents danger or not, such as a bird flapping its wings towards it.  For this reason it is strongly advised never to blow onto any tarantula as it is likely to perceive the blowing air as a threat which could cause it to run quickly to escape!!

In early May 2010 Angelina moulted for the first time since I had bought her in February 2010.  I looked into her enclosure in the morning to find this amazing scene:

She had moulted inside the thick web retreat which she had created since I bought her, and the picture above is of Angelina (mainly to the left with her head hidden from view) on top of her moulted exoskeleton (exuvium).  The parts of the exuvium which you can see clearly are the fangs (the sharp black needle-like things in amongst the red hairs at the bottom of the picture) and some of the foot pads (the brown coloured areas towards the top right of the picture)!  Here is Angelina soon after moulting, exploring the entrance to her silken retreat!

Her empty exuvium is considerably duller in colouration when compared to the colour of her fresh new exoskeleton, as you can clearly see here:

This means that she has not been looking at her best at all since I bought her, as the colour of the exuvium above represents how she looked when I bought her and I thought that she was beautiful then!  All of the photographs of Angelina on this page (apart from the one showing her large foot pads) were taken after this moult, and if you compare the before moulting (left) and after moulting (right) shots below you will see just HOW amazing the colour change has been!!

Now that she has a fresh new exoskeleton I am absolutely amazed (and delighted) at just how attractive she is, and can see much more clearly why this species is commonly known as the metallic pink toed tarantula!  I hope you like the way she looks now as much as I do!!