This very beautiful spider is Ruby, a MEXICAN RED KNEE TARANTULA.  This is the species of tarantula which most people will be familiar with from pictures or on television, as it is one of the most popular species of all due to its colouration.  Ruby is not yet fully grown, but she is already quite large as you can see and is very friendly too!

It is very unfortunate that tarantulas have such a bad reputation for being nasty and dangerous creatures as it just is not true.  Despite being venomous they are really not dangerous to people at all and rarely if ever bite people, despite films often showing them doing this.  If a person is bitten by a tarantula the effect is usually no worse than a bee sting as their venom is very weak, so they are not at all the deadly creatures that many people believe them to be. 

Tarantulas are actually generally shy and secretive animals and many spend their days hiding under logs etc. or even underground in burrows they create for themselves, but thankfully Ruby here likes to be on display in her enclosure at all times!

If you look at this picture of Ruby's head area very closely you can see six of her eight eyes!  The eight eyes of a tarantula are arranged in a cluster around a small mound at the front of the 'head' or carapace as it is correctly named, but despite having so many eyes they do not see very well at all.  Instead they rely on very sensitive hairs on their legs to detect movement and change in their environment, and they even have highly specialised leg hairs which can 'taste' the air!

Ruby has moulted three times since I bought her in September 2007, the moulting process being one of the most fascinating things about tarantulas as they completely renew the whole of their outer body or exoskeleton whilst somehow leaving their old exoskeleton in one piece!  The picture below shows the scene which greeted me on the morning of October 24th 2008, Ruby's most recent moult date:

It is always a remarkable and unusual sight as it looks like there are two tarantulas, but the one on the right of the picture is nothing more than the empty outer body (exoskeleton) which the real Ruby (on the left) has squeezed herself out of!  The empty exoskeleton is less colourful, or at least more brownish in colour, as Ruby has renewed all of her black and red/orange hairs during the moulting process!  Here she is looking lovely, within just a few hours of moulting:

And here is her moulted exoskeleton, looking remarkably like her but being nothing more than an empty case or skin, which is correctly called an exuvium:

The simple truth is that tarantulas are fascinating to watch grow and also very beautiful animals to look at and admire, which I hope you can see is definitely the case for the lovely Ruby!