Some Interesting Facts
The Brachypelma vagans has a rich history in
civilization through Central America. One of these civilizations
is the Chol, they are a Mayan descendant group and use the
B. vagans as a medicine to cure diseases. The B. vagans
is used to cure a disease the Chol call “aire de tarantula” this
disease in Mayan medicine can be cured by an herbalist with a
traditional ritual. The ritual involves finding a tarantula,
more specifically a B. vagans because it is the biggest
kind of tarantula in the area and sacred. The herbalist uses
the tarantula as an herb and makes a tarantula based drink to
cure the patient. The drink comes in many different forms but
the common ingredients are a B. vagans, alcohol,
tobacco and filtered with a fine filter paper to remove the
hairs of the tarantula from the beverage (Mackhour et al.,
2011).
Many tarantulas have misleading folklore that causes people to
want to exterminate them. Some of these common myths are tarantulas
venom can kill you, their bite causes flesh to rot and hooves to
fall of livestock and that tarantulas (Perez and Miles, 2009).
There are two diffrent
behavioral charcteristics on how spiders
deploy their urcitating hairs. The first way is push the hairs into
the other organisms skin. The other way is to kick the hairs up into
the air where they can get into the organisms body and cause
irritation (Battisti et al. 2011).
Other arthropod preditors are uneffected by the
B. vagans
urcitating hairs (Battisti et al. 2011).
A chemical found in the B. vagans venom called hyaluronidase and
has many applicible medical uses. They range from helping patients
with in vitro fetilization as well as helping the body absorb
anesthetics. Some other uses of hyaluronidase are treatment of skin
disorders and reversing side effects of hyaluron based skin care
products. (Clement H. et al. 2012)