Ally's Eight-Legged Journey

And so my decision to get my first mystery box has even more consequences.... Since Diablo arrived, she has reminded me time and time again why mystery boxes may not be the best of ideas. I had thought that now that she was rehoused into a 125 litre aquarium, she might be happy. I was happy thinking that I had done my best to make her happy, given that she was a wild caught animal. I felt guilty at the idea of her being pulled from her natural environment, shipped thousands of miles around the world, and dumped in a plastic tub in my front room. Since being moved into the larger housing, I had barely seen her as she had burrowed deep into the substrate. I took this to be a good thing, as previously she had been pacing her smaller enclosures, tapping on the glass. She certainly didn't seem content then, so now that her behaviour seemed calmer I thought that maybe she was content now. Well, it seems that she had a surprise up her many sleeves.... Just as a reminder, this is ...

It's my birthday! As it is my birthday and I am a Scorpio (not that I put any stock into astrology) I thought that we'd discuss Diablo some more. And as much as I'd like to think that Diablo is wishing me a Happy Birthday, the cold black of his eyes tells me otherwise.... Or, maybe I should say her eyes - yes, I now believe Diablo to be a girl. While I had Diablo out of the vivarium the other day to rehouse, I snapped this photo in the hopes of sexing her: Scorpions have two comblike structures called pectines which you can see in the photo above, or highlighted in this diagram below: Both sexes have these pectines, which they use as an additional sensory organ - each tooth of the comb is covered in chemoreceptors which have developed to detect scent trails, pheromones, or other chemical signals. Both sexes use them to track down prey or to find their way home to their burrow, for example. However, the male also uses his pectines to tract down receptive females for br...

Big Spood has finally gifted me with a molt, and with it I have been able to confirm the sex. I have discussed sexing tarantulas on this blog several times here and here, so this was an easy spood to sex. In my most recent post about tarantula sexing, we looked at Incy Wincy's molt and concluded that he was a male. When his molt was flipped over, there was no sign of a pouch (known as a spermathecae) under his epigastric furrow. As a reminder, this was his molt - the circled area is where there would have been a pouch in which to store sperm for fertilisation, had he been a female: As you can see, there's nothing there. I had previously posted to social media asking for people a little bit more knowledgeable than myself to attempt to sex Big Spood from her underside. This is less accurate than molt sexing as the differences are much more subtle - it is all down to the angle and the shape of the epigastric furrow. This is the photograph that I submitted to the forums, and ...

Tyson gave me a surprise this evening. Please note that I still don't know what sex Tyson is - I originally suspected female, but now I'm not sure. For the purposes of this post I will refer to Tyson as a "he", as his name is masculine. I may update his gender in later posts. Tyson is one of my two smaller mantises - a Yunnan flower mantis. He's just over an inch long, with an olive green and white body, and lovely purple eyes. I always knew that he was going to be smaller than Catchy, but I have to confess, I thought he'd get bigger than he has done. I have been waiting on a delivery of fruit flies for my smaller critters and they finally arrived today, so I was going from tank to tank, spritzing the smaller cages and then dropping some fruit flies in for them. I don't have many critters that still need fruitflies - the two smaller mantises, Loki my dwarf tarantula sling, and Pratt my curly hair sling. The two slings are about a centimeter across, ...

I learned something interesting tonight. I was out pretty late for a concert in London, so by the time I got home and turned on the front room light, it had already been dark for several hours. When I get in, the first thing I like to do is to go over to the Critter Corner and check on the critters. When I did, I found Catchy in her tank, looking at me like this: As you can see, her eyes have completely changed colour. Usually her eyes are the same vibrant green as the rest of her body (see below) but tonight, they were a tanned brown colour. Initially, I thought something was wrong - but wrong in the sense of "maybe she's preparing to molt" rather than "oh no, there's something wrong with her eyes". So I found myself doing a little bit of late night drunken research into Mantis vision. One of the first things I discovered was that mantises have five eyes, rather than two. On the image below, (which I shamelessly stole from the internet and now I can...

Incy has gifted me with a molt! He is strutting his stuff in his brand new clothes - his colouring is getting much darker now, with long peachy hairs, and his adult markings starting to show through. This is his second molt with me, and he is growing fast. Which isn't really a surprise as an adult of his species, Lasiodora parahybana can reach up to 11 inches across. As we have a nice fresh molt, and at a decent size, I thought I might try to sex Incy based on what I learned when sexing Big Spood . When his molt came out of the enclosure, it was completely shrivelled up where his abdomen would have been, so the first thing I had to do was to drop a little bit of water over the shrivelled skin, and gently tease it apart with some delicate tweezers. This left me with this trypophobic nightmare: Fun fact - the odd leaf shaped part in the middle of the cephalothorax is Incy's "sucking stomach". This is a muscular stomach which helps him to suck up his liquid food a...

Sorry, but this was too cute not to post - but spiders have paws!! Little spider pads with little spider claws. I'm sorry, but if you didn't know these were spider feet, you'd think they were cute and fuzzy. I know I do. My spiders are mostly too small to see their paws in anything near to this level of detail, but they are starting to shape as they grow. I know that Ziggy and Webster are both developing distinct toes, while Wilma has teeny tiny, itty bitty claws. I can't wait to see them properly.

With all this space to wander around in, Big Spood has started to walk on the sides of his enclosure, inadvertantly flashing his underparts at me. As he is the biggest of my spoods, and only him and Incy Wincy are really large enough to sex, I have been wondering about Big Spoods gender. Sexing a mature tarantula is much easier, as the two sexes are visually different as adults. But as a growing juvenile, it is harder. Now, I have already posted these images to two different online resources, and both of them came back to me and told me that Big Spood is most likely a FEMALE , though it's easier to tell once she has molted. Now, if she is a female, then I'm happy, because females can live in the region of twenty years, compared to the paltry four of the male. But how can we tell that Big Spood is a female? To be perfectly honest, I can't tell one from the other, although I have been reading around the subject. *Side note: Check out those awesome fangs!* Apparently, th...

When doing the spood check today, I noticed that Incy Wincy was finally showing signs of an impending molt. Since I got him, he has been scraggly looking. His abdomen was pink and bald where he had kicked off all of his hairs, presumably through the stress of being posted - Incy Wincy is a very skittish spider, and runs for cover at the slightest movement so he is very prone to kicking hairs. Once he has molted, his abdomen should be nice and fluffy again. I can't wait to see that. Spiders (and other invertebrates!) molt through a process called Ecdysis, and while most insects will hang upside down to molt, spiders lay on their backs. The external skin or exoskeleton is the top layer of two, and is also known as the cuticle. Underneath the cuticle is a layer of epidermal "skin" cells. When getting ready to molt, glands in the epidermal layer secrete a hormone to separate the two layers. This hormone contains enzymes which - when active - will digest the inner laye...

Time to move away from the Spoods and mantids, and give Diablo a little love. Since my last post about Diablo, I have added approximately 8 extra litres of coco fibre substrate into his enclosure. He loves to dig, he really loves to fill his food bowl with dirt, and who am I to stop him from doing what makes him happy? He's settled down enough now that he's not tapping on the glass all night, too. He's often found out in the daytime, just sitting and chilling. Which is nice. It also means that I've been able to get a pretty good look at him, even if I've not been able to get a decent photograph of him. When I took this photo of him, it was very obvious to see that he had two eyes, on the top of his head, in a central position. But I had heard that arachnids have between six to eight eyes. On my tarantulas, you can clearly see eyes - if not individual ones then you can see distinct clusters of eyes. So where are the others? Well, having done a bit of digging...

Tyson. Tyson, Tyson, Tyson.... I love this little mantis - he is full of personality, he loves to eat, he loves to come out and be handled. I especially love that after I named him Tyson for his little boxing gloves, I discovered that he also likes to nibble me! So he boxes and he bites, and I love that he is just living up to his name in every way. Here he is giving my finger a little nibble. He likes to walk up my finger, nibbling as he goes. He is so small right now that I don't even feel it, but I do think it's incredibly cute. He moulted this week, for the first time since he got here. When Catchy molts, she looks significantly bigger each time, but that's not the case with Tyson. Maybe Tyson is just a slower growing species, but I didn't even realise he had moulted until I saw his shed skin lying on the floor. And since we're talking about mantids, I thought we might focus on Catchy for a little bit. Catchy is definitely a favourite invertebrate of m...