Spooky night tours afford the best opportunity to see several types of tarantulas, including the Peruvian pink-toe.

BBC: Into Peru��s Amazonian heart of darkness

Prosecutors in Los Angeles said Sven Koppler was caught after he had posted tarantulas from Germany to federal agents posing as buyers.

BBC: Weekly world news quiz

At high-end bars in the United States and United Kingdom, bartenders are crafting cocktails with ingredients like crickets, tarantulas, scorpions and even giant ants.

BBC: Insect-infused cocktails

Among the rental items: a two-meter-long snake, an orangutan and some lizards and tarantulas. (The island is home to such creatures as pythons, macaques and fruit bats.) While the castaways need to be mentally and physically fit, wilderness experience isn't a must.

CNN: Have Footage, Will Travel

There were rocks everywhere, and scorpions and tarantulas and rattlesnakes, and vultures and no trees and not much water, and skinny dogs and donkeys, and ugly bad guys with guns and bullet vests who rode laughing into town to drink and shoot off their pistols and rifles, as if it were the Fourth of July, driving their horses all over town like dirt bikes on desert dunes.

NEWYORKER: Uncle Rock