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Yeah, mine was probably that large for as long as I owned it. Not sure how old it was when I got it but it's kind of an interesting story. I've always had a bit of arachnophobia, really the creepy crawlies for anything small enough and with enough legs, so the more I read about spiders and their dangerous venom the more apprehensive I became of them. When I was 15 or so I was learning about aversion therapy any thought that getting a tarantula and handling it would slowly eliminate my fear of spiders. That seemed to work, right until the day the little jerk decided to bite me while I was holding him. I tossed Lestat back in his cage and never touched him again (I now know over-handling of this particular species makes them irritable- probably why I was bitten). One summer while leaving for vacation for 2 weeks I decided that I would just put 2 weeks worth of crickets into his terrarium and let him go nuts but what I found when I can home truly surprised me (I now realize I fed him WAY too often and he easily could've survived the 2 weeks without food despite him killing 1 cricket per day). I found Lestat, dead, surrounded by the corpses of crickets with his abdomen crushed and about 3 crickets left living inside the tank. Upon observing that the spines/hairs had been ejected from his abdomen the best I could figure was that the gang of crickets had overwhelmed him to the point where he had to deploy the neuro-toxin hairs, which killed several of the crickets, only to be crushed in the end.

crawlie~!