{"id":470,"date":"2020-12-18T06:28:16","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T06:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/?p=470"},"modified":"2020-12-22T14:48:03","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T14:48:03","slug":"saving-blue-from-getting-marooned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/saving-blue-from-getting-marooned\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving Blue from Getting Marooned"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yazhini Sathiamoorthy
Stanes School, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Salutations! I am doing a double namaste for you. Since we are miles away from each other
and not on a video call, you might be wondering who I am. Let me help you guess the
answer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First clue: I never need to worry about getting ready for a video conference because I always
look perfect \u2013 dressed up to the nines, or rather eights! Also, in spite of having dense hair,
there is no need for me to comb it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t know who I am? Fine, second clue: Just like the Kohinoor diamond that had been
snatched from India, I am a shy sapphire that was smuggled to Europe.  Still no idea? Well
then, last clue: Had I been a bird, I would have been no less than the National Bird of India.
Whether you got the answer or not, I am going to reveal my identity now because I have little
time left. I am the Peacock tarantula, also called the Gooty sapphire tarantula, the rarest
tarantula in the world. Hey, hey! Don\u2019t stop reading because you are an arachnophobe and
don\u2019t shut me up in a glass box to keep me as your pet either. I have many things to tell you.
So, just cling on with your four limbs and read on! Ummm if you find that difficult, grab a
chair and pay attention to what this eight-legged quizmaster-turned-teacher is telling you
today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tarantulas are large spiders measuring up to 20 centimetres in length. Almost all species
are very hairy. But my hair differs from your hair in two main ways. First of all, my hair is not
real \u2018hair\u2019. Those of you who are now thinking that spiders must be wearing wigs are wrong.
The extensions of a tarantula\u2019s exoskeleton or cuticle form its hair, while mammalian hair is
composed of protein. The second difference is that while humans style their hair to make it
look attractive, tarantulas want their hair to be as repulsive as can be in order to deter
predators which harbour intentions of making a meal out of us. For your information, hair is
not exactly tasty (I have not tasted it though).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for some humans, my hair is not skanky enough and nor is my venomous (but not fatal)
bite formidable. I will come to that later. What might surprise you is that despite of being so
beautiful, perhaps the prettiest tarantula due to my vibrant electric blue colour, I am a
reticent person. I love trees, and I furnish holes and rock crevices with fine silk in a funnel
fashion and live inside them. My first instinct on sensing danger is to run away and hide in a
hole or something. I resort to biting only when I have no other option. Many kinds of insects
feature on my menu. I do not like being in the limelight both because my body is
photosensitive and also, unwanted human attention stresses me out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human scientists have still not yet found out why I am blue in colour. Is it a blue warning
signal, or a \u2018red\u2019 signal as you might like to call it? Is it my wedding attire? They are
perplexed about it, much to my pleasure. But I know the secret behind my blue colour, and I
am obviously not going to reveal that to you. Better become an arachnologist and figure it
out yourself! Also, please do not deposit me in your bad books just because I am repeatedly
saying that blue colour makes me the most beautiful arachnid. I am not a racist, and there
are many other differently-coloured spiders out there \u2013 black, white, green, brown, yellow
and much more! Plus, I offer full moral support to the Black Lives Matter movement.Surprised at my current affairs knowledge? Unfortunately, I have become a cosmopolitan
spider, although I am native to India. I live in a very restricted place of less than 100 square
kilometres in a reserve forest in Andhra Pradesh and patches of the Eastern Ghats. That is a
small area, indeed, and it is being diminished further by felling trees. Habitat destruction and
deforestation spell doom for my species. Also, armed human operations that have been
happening in my home steal the essence of nature. I feature on the IUCN (International
Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List as Critically Endangered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, my scientific name is Poecilotheria Metallica. But vehicles which look more
metallic and have more legs than me come into my place and raze the trees. As a result, our
small yet satisfying home has turned into a slum, with many of us being forced to share the
same tree. Not that there are many Peacock tarantulas left. IUCN has described our
population as Decreasing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the present is quite unpleasant, let me tell you a bit about my history. I was discovered
by Reginald Innes Pocock in Gooty in 1899 and hence my name, Gooty sapphire tarantula.
But that was not exactly my ancestors\u2019 adda. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
great-great grandmother (females live for about 12 years while males for only a couple of
years) had actually climbed onto a pile of logs and got a free ride and a rather bittersweet
welcome to the human world in Gooty. Her home was in the forest between Nandyal and
Giddalur. But she is now preserved in a British museum. It took 102 years for researchers to
come across another Peacock tarantula and they saw my grandmother in 2012 and that too
in Villupuram in Tamil Nadu! Scientists have come across me only twice since my discovery.
But many unforeseen happenings took place during this time. What happened was that
many of my friends had been smuggled abroad, captive-bred and sold to be kept as pets.
Let me warn you right now: I do not make a good pet and handling a sedated cum stressed
spider in artificial conditions is not a brave act at all. I just don\u2019t understand what humans are
trying to do by driving harmless house spiders out of their houses or killing them and instead
of catching or buying endangered tarantulas like me and feeding us with foreign insects!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like I said, my actual home is in a forest in Andhra Pradesh, and I am called Sale-purgu in
Telugu there. For those of you who know Hindi, please understand and make others
understand that it does not translate into \u2018sale-par-hoon\u2019. As far as I am concerned, I am
strictly not for sale. Woefully, if you Google me, you get search results like \u2018peacock
tarantula for sale\u2019. When you look for me on YouTube, you will get head-splitting tutorials on
how to take care of a \u2018dangerous darling\u2019 that is, me. This is for all my social media fans: All
living creatures know how to take care of themselves and do not need help from humans as
long as their habitat is undisturbed. I belong to myself, and my heart belongs to India.
Tarantula enthusiasts might as well help in reintroducing tarantulas in their wild habitat
instead of paying a fortune to buy them online and keep them as pets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I forgot to tell you that I have another name too \u2013 Peacock parachute spider because I can
glide like a parachute from one tree to another and land on the ground if I want to. What
Spiderman does on skyscrapers, I do on trees. I often wish my friends could come back from
the continents where they currently are, floating over the blue sea like blue parachutes. Just
like Indian humans stranded in foreign countries were brought back to India during the initial
days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I hope that Peacock tarantulas too set all eight feet in the
place where they naturally belong and which suits them the best, and are given the basic
right to live in peace. I will be waiting for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yazhini SathiamoorthyStanes School, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu Salutations! I am doing a double namaste for you. Since we are miles away from each otherand not on a video call, you might be wondering who I am. Let me help you guess theanswer.  First clue: I never need to worry about getting ready for a video conference because I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[192,191,185],"class_list":["post-470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-natures-lap","tag-free-online-publishing-platform","tag-vov-writer","tag-yazhini-sathiamoorthy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":726,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions\/726"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}