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...

As usual, Big Spood is happy to be out and about. She clearly enjoys the attention she gets (and why not - she's definitely the largest of the Spoods, and big is beautiful after all!) After spritzing her this evening, I quite liked the way the water was beading on her fur, so I took these photos. I also like the way her chelicerae look so velvety... I kind of wish I could touch them to see if they feel as velvety as they look, but...I don't think she would appreciate that. She definitely has a "look but don't touch" kind of a vibe, as as soon as I open the lid to her enclosure she is right there to chase me away...

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...