The Constitution of the British Tarantula Society outlines one of its aims as "to encourage and participate in a long-term captive breeding programme which will both relieve the pressure on the indigenous habitats and create a supply of reasonably priced specimens for the amateur arachnologist".
For this far-sighted aim to be fulfilled the amateur arachnologist must not only breed tarantulas, but rear the resulting spiderlings to adulthood.
Therefore the whole breeding programme depends on fresh males being available. Unfortunately male theraphosids only live for twenty months at the most once they have matured. It is very important that fresh males are available every year, and the only practical way of doing this is to rear spiderlings to adulthood.
This book is the next step in this programme. It outlines the methods used to attempt to sex spiderlings before they reach maturity. Sex determination can usually be positive from six months of age.
If we can give the amateur arachnologist sexed spiderlings, a great deal of wasted effort can be avoided. Young males could then be "grown on" at a rate which coincides with the coming into "heat" of the available females. Thus the hit and miss methods of the past can be avoided.
The lay-out of this book is to prepare the average lay-man, step by step, to be able to determine the sex of his stock. This entails imparting some information about the structure of the spider, its reproductive organs, its skin and the resulting moult. Armed with this information, one is guided in stages in the preparation and examination of the moult skin and finally comparing the observations with diagrams to help in the determination of sex.