Rodrigo Orozco is a Guadalajara-based businessman, who in his spare time also plays the role of “foster father” to 6,000 young tarantulas.
Recently, Orozco installed his brood of hairy spiders in a new home, the Ecological Center of Pinar de la Venta, located eight kilometers west of town on the road to Nogales. The center held an open house on October 29, drawing a crowd of over 40 people curious to know more about tarantulas.
Orozco has been interested in arthropods, the biological grouping that includes spiders, since his childhood, but 18 years ago made a decision that changed his life dramatically.
“I discovered what sort of methods were being used by poachers in Mexico to catch and sell tarantulas,” he says.
A typical example, explains the spider expert, is the individual who spends days catching wild tarantulas and stuffing them into a suitcase.
“There may be 700 tarantulas in the suitcase and the poacher, if he is lucky, may sell a dozen. All the others die.”
Since the only tarantulas which are easy to catch are males wandering about in search of females (who never leave their burrows), a single poacher can literally exterminate all the tarantulas in a given area.
This situation gave Orozco the idea of raising tarantulas in captivity and selling them cheaply, in order to put the poachers out of business.
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