Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens
-Green Bottle Blue

Description

Common Names: Green Bottle Blue Tarantula | GBB

Scientific Names: Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens

A personal favourite. This bird spider is nothing less than rewarding to own and beautiful to look at. Even as a sling, this spider displays an amazing array of coloring with a golden carapace, tiger patterned opisthosoma/abdomen and pink legs with little black feet/tarsi that make it look like it’s wearing little black boots. These colours slowly change as the tarantula grows and the final product is a true beauty, regularly extracting a “wow” or “that’s amazing” from people that have never seen them before.

They are not a shy species which makes for a great display tarantula. They are voracious feeders from sling to adult and grow at a fairly quick pace too. The Green Bottle Blue is also a webbing specialist and creates the most amazing webbed hammocks and tunnels that it uses to detect prey, making it’s enclosure a showpiece on it’s own. Make sure to include pieces of driftwood and various structures in their enclosures that they can use to anchor their webbing, you won’t be disappointed. Keep in mind that the GBB originated in a desert-like region so they are more comfortable in an enclosure that is not too high in humidity. In our experience simple over filling their water dish to wet the substrate around it provides sufficient humidity.

Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens is also very similar in appearance to Aphonopelma mooreae (previously moorei)  which is slightly more spindly with a darker metallic sheen to it’s coloring. Sadly, Aphonopelma mooreae has not yet been seen in the South African hobby.

Breeding this species is a tricky affair and females very often respond violently to the approaches of a male, so make sure you have more than one mature male around if breeding is going to be attempted.