Queen Tarantula
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When it comes to pets, people around the world don’t always mean dogs, cats or birds — few have a love of exotic animals too. From iguanas to lizards and even snakes, people love adopting unusual animals, including tarantulas! Yes, the creepy, scary hairy arachnids. Well, now imagine living with not one or two about 1,500 of them.
Meet 28-year old Ming Cu, a woman from Indonesia who has been collecting tarantulas since 2010 as a hobby. But with time her interest grew and now she shares her home in Bandung City with 1,500-odd spiders. She even started out a website called Spider Lover Pet Shop to sell the unusual pets online in 2012, and has a large base of consumers.
According to reports, Cu’s obsession with tarantulas began when she found a beautifully coloured tarantula in her backyard. She only took some photos of it, but the more she looked at the pictures, the more fascinated she became with the eight-legged creatures. She started looking for sellers online and finally got her first one and before she knew it she had built quite a collection. With so many pets, came great care and a proper setup to nature and store her pets and in the past seven years, Cu has spent over $55,000 on tarantulas.
The business venture started out with a friend who has quit over time, but Cu still is in awe with the insects, even though she has been bitten “several times.”
Cu also breeds the eight-legged creature and admits there are difficulties. “The challenge in breeding and keeping thousands of tarantulas is that I’m actually doing it alone, at first, and so it takes me time, personal time, there is no me time at all,” she told Ruptly.
The Indonesian spider enthusiast, who graduated from Bandung Institute of Technology in Product Designing, keeps her hairy pets in jars and glass terrariums and sources them from around the world.
Her bizarre obsession has also earned her fame and is known as “Queen Tarantula”, a nickname she’s quite proud of it.