I recently did a post about how strong tarantulas are, and a great suggestion was made by James King on my YouTube channel about tarantula fang size and penetration. I hadn’t seen much information on it before, and after learning a bit more about the freakish strength that tarantulas possess, I thought it would be great to look into.

Tarantula fang size obviously varies depending on the species of tarantula, its age, and its sex. A mature female in any species is going to have larger fangs than a male due to the fact that she is bigger. She’s likely going to be stronger, too.

Tarantula fang size definitely depends on the species, but some tarantulas have very big fangs in proportion to their bodies. Some say that Grammostola rosea/porteri tarantulas have very large fangs in relation to the rest of their bodies. A Theraphosa blondi (Bird eating tarantula) has fangs that can reach approximately 1 inch long!

When it came to finding the strength of tarantula fang penetration, though, it wasn’t so easy to measure or find information about. Unfortunately, for a lot of the questions that tarantula owners have about their spiders, there just isn’t a lot of professional research available. Fang penetration is one of these areas, but I tried to do my best to find what I could about this.

Much of tarantula information and observations come strictly from tarantula owners themselves. Doing a quick search through Arachnoboards, I found tarantula owners saying that they’ve witnessed things like a T. stirmi biting through a thick deli cup container, and a G. porteri chewing through the metal screen top of her enclosure (many tarantula owners actually observe this).

There really isn’t much data about the force of tarantula fang penetration, but what they are actually able to puncture might be a surprise. Here’s a pretty interesting video by Saminal Planet’s YouTube of his King Baboon Tarantula (Pelinobius muticus) biting a piece from his suture kit. While I don’t condone teasing or harassing any animal, it seems the purpose of this video was for educational purposes and not entertainment:

Tarantula fangs are actually extremely hard and considering that their bodies operate on a pressurized system instead of muscle, they probably have very strong jaws. There’s been a good deal of recent science about what tarantula fangs are made of, which definitely adds to the force of penetration.

It turns out that tarantula fangs are covered in chitin, which is the bug equivalent to bone. Through chemical analysis and X-ray detection, it was also discovered that their fangs have metal atoms dispersed throughout, mainly copper, magnesium, iron and zinc. Older tarantulas actually have the hardest fangs, because the metals accumulate each time a spider molts! Interestingly enough, there isn’t much chitin in the tips of tarantula fangs, which means that the tips are nearly all metal – which makes sense, since the points must endure the most stress upon penetration.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory by Stanford University reported:

Spiders don’t have flashy metal fangs, but they do rely on metal deposits to make their fangs extra strong and fracture resistant. A shiny strip of tin foil is an example of an organized cluster of many metal atoms. In contrast, the metals in spider fangs and other critter appendages are single atoms held in place by non-metals. This is part of the reason that no one discovered these deposits until about 30 years ago: it is difficult to detect a single atom unless you are specifically looking for it. Moreover, the metals—mainly iron, copper, manganese and zinc—are present only in very small parts of the animal. This may include the very tips of scorpion or crab claws, the tiny fangs of spiders, or the jagged teeth on the mandibles of ants. The structures are small but undergo proportionally large stresses as they come into contact with the environment.

The metals accumulate after molting, as the animals grow into adulthood. Researchers monitored the percentage of metal deposits at different times during development and observed the channels through which the metals migrate into appendages. They found that different metals settle in different areas: zinc is found in the tips of spider fangs while manganese is found in the trunk. Often, metal atoms in the newly hardened structures are also paired with specific non-metals: zinc with chlorine, and manganese with calcium. In the image above, the upper right frame shows X-ray detection of zinc; the lower left shows X-ray detection of manganese. The lower right frame combines the images: zinc is green and manganese is red.

That’s truly fascinating, and I can’t wait until they do more research on this. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to actually come to any real conclusions about the force of tarantula fang penetration, so if anyone has more information on this please let me know in the comments or by sending me an email at info@tarantulaheaven.com. In the meantime, I hope this post was interesting to you 🙂

If you want to learn more about tarantulas, feel free to check out my big tarantula guide (I talk about lots of tarantula facts and enclosure/care tips). You can also get free tarantula tips by signing up for my newsletter or subscribing to my YouTube channel! I release new tips every Tuesday for Tarantula Tuesday!

Featured image via Matt Reinbold / Flickr