Michael Jacobi

MY STORY

I still remember being a fascinated young boy with jars of live spiders in my garage and tanks full of grasshoppers in my driveway. My cousin Karl caught a bunch of ribbon snakes near his suburban home and during one family visit I took a few home. I was about 9. Fifty years later, I have only stopped keeping reptiles & arachnids a half dozen years ago. I enjoyed decades of herpetoculture & arachnoculture while breeding snakes (pythons, boas, colubrids and vipers), geckos, chameleons, dart frogs and tarantulas.

After more than a few failed attempts to earn a zoology degree and become a herpetologist, I started a career in the pet industry over thirty years ago. I became immersed in the captive husbandry and breeding of reptiles, amphibians and tarantulas, sometimes working for others and sometimes operating my own businesses with names like Jacobi Herpetoculture, Chicago Reptile, Exotic Fauna, Michael Jacobi's Spider Shoppe and The Living Terrarium.

Writing has been another lifelong passion and along the way I added skills in editing, website & graphic design and photography. Many projects have come and gone. One of these was ARACHNOCULTURE magazine (< click to download PDF of first four of seven issues), which I published from 2005-2007. I also created the online resources The Tarantula Bibliography (a monthly updated compendium of all of the world's theraphosid spider species along with citations to related publications), and The World of Atheris (an online monograph devoted to the African bush vipers of the tribe Atherini). Although these web resources have since vanished into the cyberspace ether, my written works such as my Animal Planet published book Tarantulas survive, and the Publications and Media pages of this website share many articles I have authored or videos I have produced. I also sold a monograph on geckos and their husbandry to T.F.H. Publications but, sadly, it was never published.

After a decade of traveling to the jungles of Costa Rica, Suriname, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Borneo, in 2017 I returned to my U.S. roots. I lived full-time on the road in an RV to facilitate enjoying the incredible diversity of American fauna and flora and its beautiful and varied landscape. January and March was spent in Florida (with a break between to travel to Malaysia) and April found me following the Mexican border west across Texas. I jumped around a bit in late April and May as I spent time assisting some scorpion research in Arizona, but headed back east to New Mexico and back again to Arizona before finally setting at Rusty's RV Ranch in Rodeo, New Mexico. Situated in the San Simon Valley, nestled between the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico's boot heel and the wondrous Chiricahuas of southeastern Arizona, I spent four months at Rusty's in order to explore the Chiris most days and road cruise the boot heel most nights. In this field herper's paradise, I also became enamored of the birds and other wildlife.

Most visit Arizona during the winter ("snowbirds") and spend their summers in temperate climes, but I am a maverick (positive spin) or a knucklehead (brutal truth) and did the opposite. I actually returned to my native Chicagoland for the winter of 2017-2018 in order to work and visit family.

In April 2018 I returned to Rusty's to continue hiking, herping and birding with camera in hand. I had arranged to be volunteer host at the Cave Creek Canyon Visitor Information Center beginning in June, but my training and duties started very soon after arrival back in the area. As spring became summer, I agreed to stay through September, then October, then November 2018. Friends of Cave Creek Canyon, the non-profit organization that I volunteer for, got special permission along the way for me to stay camped in the Chiricahua Mountains for longer than normally permitted. I had become the caretaker of the VIC and being camped only 100 yards up canyon from it for seven months was a treat.

In January 2019, I made my third field trip to Malaysia, once again spending time with my mate Mark Pennell and his family and friends on Langkawi Island, Malaysia (my third trip!), after a visit to Hong Kong and Penang. I then returned to my position at the VIC in March 2019 and stayed until January 2020. My three year RV-dwelling road odyssey, which became mostly based in the Portal, Arizona to Rodeo, New Mexico area, had come to an end. I required medical care and family support that I could only get in Illinois and my Chicagoland hometown. My three years involved observing and photographing an incredible amount of amazing wildlife, including several hundred rattlesnakes and many tarantulas and other arachnids. My field research with Dr. Brent Hendrixson included much tarantula and scorpion hunting, and I not only was able to find the rare female Aphonopelma chiricahua in my home base but also, along with Brent, I discovered a new dwarf montane tarantula at high elevation in the Chiricahua Mountains on Halloween Day 2018.

In December 2019, I ended my three-year “life on the road, living in an RV, every day is a field trip” odyssey and returned to my suburban Chicago hometown. I needed to address mental, physical, dental, and financial issues. I blogged about all of this here in honor of Mental Health Awareness month.

On March 14, 2020, I presented at the 18th Annual British Tarantula Society Lectures & Dinner. My featured banquet lecture is titled “The Tarantulas of the USA with a Focus on the Sky Islands of Arizona and New Species.” The presentation provided an overview of all USA tarantulas with an emphasis on the Sky Island species that are my primary interest. The talk chronicled my three years in the field in the southwestern United States through 200 slides featuring my wildlife photography. It concluded with a look at the new species Brent and I discovered with four specimens on October 31, 2018, and then found many more when a team of six searched the Chiricahua Mountains and then moved onto other Sky Island ranges where some potential new species were uncovered. Our late November-early December team was comprised of myself and Drs. Brent Hendrixson and Chris Hamilton, along with Chad Campbell, Tom Patterson, and Wyatt Mendez. After returning from the U.K., which included a wonderful visit to the highlands of Scotland, I recorded a narrated version of my Keynote presentation that can be viewed here.

Update September 2023: Living in Chicagoland again has seen me working a “straight job” and enjoying family. I have had no adventures to share and I have suspended blogging for some time. I hope to pick it back up when I travel to Thailand in Summer 2024 in celebration of my sixtieth birthday

In early 2023 my bonus dad Joel and I embarked on a trip-of-a-lifetime, spending ten days throughout Ecuador, including the magnificent Galapagos Islands. This was no herping or verting adventure. It was a fully guided DIscovery Tour with Gate One Travel. Still, we did enjoy time in the field, snorkeling with THREE Green Sea Turtles, observing countless Marine Iguanas and Galapagos Tortoises and catching tarantulas in the Amazon Rainforest at Sacha Lodge. Images from this trip can be found in my Instagram feed.

My next adventure will be to southern Thailand in late August-early September on a guided herpetological tour. Stay tuned for more.

• for a brief "In Focus" interview with me published in the Journal of the BTS click here.