My life is the creatures that many people don’t see or don’t want to see.

As I grew up on a farm, there was a little miracle waiting for me every day, in every place. The world was a huge, for me incomprehensible spectacle and everything seemed to be connected, I just didn’t know where the beginning and the end were.

For days I sat next to an anthill trying to figure out how each one knew how and what to do at that exact moment. My new roommates were mole crickets and cockchafer larvae brought to light during plowing. I lovingly set up an old jam jar and tried to offer them a new habitat near me. The list of animals I successfully nursed to death ranged from young birds that had fallen out of their nests, ant workers who found every crack in the Lego house I had built for them, to newt tadpoles, tadpoles and fly larvae caught from the pond.
I remember lying in bed at night and trying to reconstruct why the animals preferred to run away or die instead of living a nice life with me.
At this time, my mother had a brilliant idea. She gave me a nature guide. It contained everything I discovered in the house and garden, on walks, hikes and on vacation. From that moment on, I was never seen alone but always with a thick book in my hands. He was my bible, my guide to nature. He explained the way of life of many animal species and even gave me practical tips. One of them was how to make a bone preparation from a dead rat. Of course, I didn’t give a second thought to the effect it would have on other people, so I ended up making the aforementioned ratatouille in my parents’ kitchen.
The more I read, the more I realized how I could successfully keep insects. They don’t adapt to my conditions, I have to adapt my artificial habitat to them.

Each species has adapted to a wide variety of conditions and it was not enough to know whether they lived on the surface or in the ground or in standing or flowing water.
Unfortunately, I still find husbandry reports about animals in which a country name is given as the origin. What use is this information? I still don’t know anything about the animal’s habitat.

Over time, my knowledge grew, as did the types of animals I kept. When I first came into contact with exotic inhabitants, I had a new bar to climb.
My first exotic was a Grammostola rosea, the red Chilean tarantula.

As I had very good experiences with my nature guide, I read through all the specialist books before I dared to buy the animal. Back then it was something special and everyone around me came to see the animal. I was always allowed to answer the same questions about toxicity and their food. I realized that my friends knew just as little about distant tarantulas as they did about the tarantula that was in their own home.

Successful care was only the first stage for me in the new world of exotics. I also wanted to breed them successfully, because for me that was the greatest honor of successful keeping.
Very quickly I found myself opening the almost infinite number of film canisters every week. There I raised all the spiderlings individually. Open the lid, spray in once, put in the Drosophila and close the lid again. When you consider that around 200-800 spiderlings can hatch in one cocoon, you realize the dimensions. This was the case for all species and genera. I specialized in chameleons, dendrobates and snakes for a long time and ran a specialist terrarium store for over 10 years.
My love of insects never waned.