Ally's Eight-Legged Journey

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...

Ziggy is on the prowl again. Whenever one of my spiders is out and about, I tend to assume it's hungry, because as a rule they tend to hide away where I can't see them. They emerge to hunt, so that is when I usually feed them. It was a text book feeding for Ziggy. He was wandering around, so I dropped a small locust in. He grabbed it and immediately dragged it into his web to eat it. Perfect - one well fed spiderling. Hopefully he hangs around for many more feedings, because I can't wait for this one to be grown up. One thing that interested me while he was feeding though, was just how well camouflaged he is when he's sitting against that bark. Some times I will be looking into the tank for ages before I finally catch a glimpse of a leg. It's hard to get a clear photograph through misty perspex - and one day he will have a shiny glass enclosure. But for now I have done my best.

Prior to my trip to Amsterdam, I've been doing regular checks on all of the critters - I check the Spoods regular anyway, but I'm now checking much more frequently to make sure that none of them needs anything while I'm away. A bit much? Maybe, but I'd rather this than come back to some ex-critters. In checking on Lucifer, I found that I couldn't find him. He didn't seem to be anywhere in his enclosure... until I looked a little closer and discovered him sitting on the bark hide at the bottom of his enclosure. Once you see him, you can't unsee him. It's obvious where he is. But at the time, I couldn't find him for anything.