Ally's Eight-Legged Journey

Last night I ordered my spider. A female jumping spider, from the Spider Shop. She arrives the day after my birthday, and I shall name her Winifred. Wish me luck!

Living where I do, just walking into a shop and buying a spider isn't an easy task. Actual pet shops are few and far between, and in general I don't even like them. With my fish, I prefer to get them from a specialist store - Someone who knows their livestock inside and out, can give me accurate care information, and can help when things go wrong. Why would this be any different for a spider? I have done some looking around, and due to my not being able to drive, my best option for getting my pet spider is mail order. This makes me so anxious. There are a lot of webstores around which will ship out a jumping spider. There are even a lot of independent breeders I could buy from on social media, and then there are those less reputable people who go out into the world and catch the spiders from the wild for a profit. (Fortunately, due to Phiddipus regius being an American species, the number of these latter people in the UK appears to be next to none). Fortunately, whil...

Now that I have desensitised myself to sudden spiders on my social media streams, I feel ready to tackle the next stage of my mission - learning to live with spiders. To do this, I feel the need to get a pet spider. I am very aware - as many have said - that I can just pick up a spider out of the garden. For free. I've been told that I'm wasting my money buying a spider, that I don't need one, that this is a fools endeavor. And maybe they're right. But nothing ever came of giving up before you even start and I want to do this. I don't feel like I can just pick up a sider from my garden. The majority of spiders in my garden are garden spiders, Araneus diadematus . I hate these spiders with a passion. They hang upside down, seemingly in mid air, with a predatory attitude about them. And yes, I know that spiders are predatory, that's kind of the point of them. But these ones are just......nightmare fuel. And every time I walk down the garden path their...

So, firstly a little bit of back story. My name is Ally, though many people call me Tig. I am a 40 year old animal science laboratory technician at an agricultural university. I graduated with a first class degree in Zoology with aquatic biology. In my time as an undergrad I undertook grassland sampling, invertebrate sampling, kick sampling, and I spent several weeks doing biodiversity work of all kinds in the Borneo rainforest. I have had plenty of exposure to invertebrates, and I have enjoyed it. In my personal life, I have kept giant African land snails, Indian stick insects, and giant millipedes. I love all animals and have no fear of insects - I love to handle them, the bigger the better. ......except for spiders. Spiders, spooders, nopes. More recently I have come to call them Ticklers of Terror. My fear of spiders is such that during my first year of uni I resisted all efforts to have me visit the endangered cave spiders at a site of scientific interest. During my seco...