ABOUT MICHAEL JACOBI & Exotic Fauna
Exotic Fauna is the web home of Michael Jacobi, author of Animal Planet's Tarantulas, proprietor of Michael Jacobi's Spider Shoppe, and creator of The Tarantula Bibliography and ARACHNOCULTURE E-ZINE. Michael is an author, photographer, naturalist, educator and breeder with vast arachnid and reptile experience.
Michael Jacobi's experience keeping and breeding reptiles and arachnids is wide-ranging. Over the course of 35 years he has specialized at one time or another in pythons, arboreal vipers, geckos and tarantulas, and has also worked extensively with chameleons and frogs. He has bred about one hundred species of snakes, lizards (especially geckos) and dart frogs, as well as several dozen species of tarantula.
Michael's new book Tarantulas is published by TFH as part of the Animal Planet Pet Care Library. It was released in September 2011. His upcoming book Geckos (A complete guide to Gekkota), part of the Complete Herp Care series by TFH, is slated be released in 2013.
Through Exotic Fauna Enterprises, he published ARACHNOCULTURE, an international print journal for keepers of tarantulas and scorpions that has now been replaced by an online e-zine version. In 2006 he filmed the TARANTULAS IN THE TERRARIUM instructional DVD, which is now available as a QuickTime movie for computer with excerpts appearing on YouTube. His work with arboreal vipers included the WORLD OF ATHERIS website, which was online from 1999-2012. He also has a strong interest in field research and accompanied renowned tarantula authority Andrew M. Smith of lovetarantulas.com on a 2006 expedition to Costa Rica where they found and studied a dozen species of theraphosid spider. In November 2012 he again traveled with Andrew in search of big hairy spiders in Suriname, South America along with Andrew's long time field trip partner Paul Carpenter and Guy Tansley of giantspiders.com.
Michael is the North American Representative of the British Tarantula Society and was the keynote speaker at the BTS Lectures in February 2007. He has also lectured at reptile events and the annual conferences of The American Tarantula Society and ArachnoCon, a 2006 and 2007 convention he also helped organize.
Michael was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1964 and grew up and spent much of his adult life in suburban Chicagoland. Since 2000, he lived in eastern Washington, Nashville, Seattle, Milwaukee, and Seattle again, but in March 2013 returned to the Chicago area to be with family. Michael is divorced and has no children. When he's not outdoors looking for critters and photographing nature, or indoors staring at a computer screen or breeding critters, his passions include disc (Frisbee™) golf, guitar, reading, writing, online poker and spending time with his dog Taylor and parrot Jesse.
