Ally's Eight-Legged Journey

Another short gratuitous photo post, which exists purely to showcase Wilma, with her cute eyes. I love how fluffy she is right now, and I definitely think that her markings look like eyebrows - she has a permanently surprised expression going on.

A pointless post today, as I don't have a lot to report - I'm flying out tonight and everything is done. That said, while I was packing my stuff and getting ready to leave, I couldn't help but notice these little eyes watching me from over the edge of her hammock as if to say "Where are you going?" She is very cute.

This is the last of the feeding posts, as I have fed all of the critters who would take food. The jumpers are a little awkward to feed at the moment. They are a lot fussier with food than my others, who will eat anything so long as it's sized appropriately. The jumpers....well, they only really like green bottles. Unfortunately, I don't have any green bottles in stock at the moment. I have ordered some, but they take several days to arrive and then another week or so to emerge from their pupal stage. With me being about to head off for a few days, it's just not going to happen. But spiders still have to eat, and the regals are currently looking pretty hungry! With the flies I tend to just drop the pupae into the enclosure, then it hatches when it hatches and the spoods can hunt properly. As I don't have flies, I have to work with what I have, and what I have is meal worms. I can't release mealworms into the enclosures becuase the spiders like to be high up -...

Wilma has finally emerged from her molting web. She molted about a week ago, and kicked her little helmet out of her nest. Mostly she's just been sitting in her nest chilling since then, but I'm guessing she'd getting hungry, because she was out and about today. And look how fluffy she is! Honestly, she makes me think that she'd just escaped a session in the tumble dryer! Those little eyebrows are just too perfect!

So, Wilma just got through a major milestone with me - her first molt. Now, ordinarily this wouldn't be a major issue - my other spoods molt all the time. I'm not sure a week goes by where someone hasn't molted. But with Wilma I was especially nervous, as a molt was exactly how I lost Winnie. I'm not convinced that it was just molting that killed Winnie - I blame a husbandry mistake. I fed Winnie a waxworm as a treat. The waxworm was huge compared to Winnie but in the past she had dropped her prey when she got full. I couldn't get her to drop the waxworm. She held onto that thing like her life depended on it. In the end, she was massively bloated, definitely overfed, and I believe this triggered a premature molt. She had only molted a fortnight earlier, so definitely wasn't due to molt. When she molted, she had some sort of trouble, as she died very shortly after the molt. As such, I was very anxious about Wilma's first molt, even though I've...

Look how fluffy she is!!! I've never seen a spider quite as fluffy as Wilma. Hairy, yes. But Wilma looks like a little dust bunnie, she's absolutely adorable. I am going to have to keep a very close eye on this one though, because she LOVES food. In one week, she ate 3 fruit flies and 2 green bottles, and then caught a third green bottle that had accidentally ended up in her enclosure when (presumably) the caster got mixed up in her substrate and not noticed. There hasn't been a single prey item that she has let pass her by. So I will have to watch her very closely to prevent over feeding and the same issues that faced Winnie. In this photo, she actually has THREE fruitflies in her fangs at once. She tried to catch a fourth, but it got away. Now that she is settled into her enclosure, her personality is coming out. She loves to eat, loves to explore, and she panics a lot less than Winnie did when she is handled. In fact, she likes to explore my hand, has tried to ...

My new jumping spider has been home for a few days now. She is a very shy little thing, not nearly as curious as Winnie was, but I am hoping that will come with time. She molted in transit, so I have mostly left her alone to adjust as I didn't want to stress her out too much. She is currently smaller than Winnie was - I don't think I remembered how small Winnie was when she arrived, so I wasn't expecting it - but she is cute. She has the same magenta chelicerae as Winnie did, though her colouring is a slightly different shade - brighter. As she has been home a while, I have determined that Winona didn't seem to fit her after all. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was too close to Winnie, maybe I didn't like the fact that it would inevitably be shortened to Winnie. But she has since been named Wilma - so now my jumping spiders are Fred and Wilma. Cheesy? Maybe. But I like it.