Ally's Eight-Legged Journey

It feels as though I have only just got these critters, but the first spiny leaf insect has matured. It's hardly surprising. Since they arrived, these stick insects have decimated the raspberry plants that I grow in my garden. I am constantly clipping fresh leaves to put into their enclosure, and they have been molting quite often. The most recent molt for this one has resulted in a mature male stick insect. The easiest way to tell that it is mature is the presence of wings, as nymphs generally don't have wings, and a subadult insect can have at the most wing nubs. So this insect suddenly emerging from his molt with wings tells me he is mature. The presence of full length, fully functional wings tells me that this is a male. Female stick insects tend to be much larger than males, and only have vestigial wings that can't carry their bulky weight. This guy is long and skinny, indicating a male. Obviously, he is quite a bit larger than I was anticipating - most of the s...

Today is a sad day for Catchy. She went int' her final molt before I had been able to move her from her original enclosure into a larger one. I had known that she was getting too large for the arboreal acrylic enclosure she was in - she was outgrowing the mesh square in the roof of the tank - and I had bought her a new glass one with a larger mesh roof. Unfortunately, I have been so busy with work and catching up on missed items that I hadn't gotten around to moving her yet. Additionally, I had gotten a little lax in misting her tank as the weather got warmer. I would come home from work, eat-shower-sleep, and then leave in the morning to do it all over again. The follies of commuting via public transport. So why is this a problem? This has caused Catchy two main problems. The first can be seen in the photo above. Catchy did not have enough space on the mesh covering to stretch her freshly molted legs out while they were hardening. Her leg span was larger than the ava...

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 haven't had much to report on Ladybug for a little while. Ladybug is a very shy spider who spends most of his time hiding in his nest, only coming out when he's wanting to hunt. He's not overly sociable and he definitely doesn't like to be handled, which I have to respect. Since I got him I've been umming and ahhing about what gender he is - His colouration seemed to indicate that he was a female, as males are supposed to be scarlet red. However, after his most recent molt he seems to be developing the chonky front legs and the "boxing glove" pedipalps of a male. He is still clearly a sub-adult, so maybe his colouration will change with his next molt, but I definitely believe him to be a male now. You can clearly see that his front legs have become chonkier than his other six (all the better to dance the mamba with), and the tips of his pedipalps are becoming more bulbous. He may only have one molt left before he's mature and unfortunately I don...

The elusive Ziggy is out and about! Obviously that means he is hungry and looking for food, so I threw a small cricket into his enclosure, but not before I snapped a photo. I am pretty sure that he has molted again - He has got a series of tunnels under the substrate, so I don't actually see him out and about very often. Nor do I know when he's in premolt, molting, or molted! This is why I gave up on my Spood-sheet. I wasn't getting the information to properly update it! He definitely looks like he's just about doubled in size now, compared to when I first got him, and his legs are starting to look chinkier, and get that nice feathered look that old world T's tend to get - they look like they're wearing little leg warmers. His adult markings are starting to develop - you can clearly see the dark markings on his abdomen and the cream stripe down the middle, althouth he's not developing the blue and yellow that I'm so excited to see. That said, the ...

Just a quickie post today - as I was leaving for work this morning I happened to notice that Catchy was in the process of molting, so I snapped a picture. I can't help but feel like she won't fit in her enclosure for much longer, so maybe I should be on the look out for a larger arboreal tank. ...Yes, that is a half eaten mealworm in her enclosure, as I fed her yesterday and I guess she wasn't really that hungry. (Not a surprise if she was prepping for a molt!)

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...

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...

I fed Catchy tonight. I am learning that she doesn't like worms, but prefers greenbottles. Unfortunately, she needs several green bottles to fill her up so I may need to look around for something larger soon. Fortunately, she only eats sporadically, so it's not a huge issue right now. This was Catchy when I first got her: And this is Catchy now! This is the exact same enclosure in the background, which I hope gives some indication of how much she's grown. She has only molted about 4 or 5 times, but she grows significantly each time. I do have other mantises - two Yunnan flower mantises and a dead leaf mantis. They are growing too, but not nearly at the rate that Catchy is. I absolutely adore looking at her - Especially when she looks at me back and the little black dots appear in her eyes looking almost like pupils. She definitely has character.

Time for a non-spood related post. Catchy. Catchy is definitely my favourite mantis. I'm not sure whether it's because she was my first or is my biggest, but I love her. She's a lot of fun to get out and handle, and feeding times are always entertaining. Well, usually anyway. At her last feeding, she again batted the prey away. She really didn't want to take the food she had been offered, despite me offering it several times. By now, I know that this means a molt is imminent, so when my daughter came to me and told me "Mummy, Catchy's bum is grey!" I knew that she was preparing a shed. Lo and behold, I woke up the next morning to this: I can't get her out as yet to show off her new size as she needs to harden up - I would be scared of injuring her. But she is just getting bigger and bigger, at an amazing rate. It is fascinating to watch. My other mantids have each had one molt since arriving, and they're a fraction of her size. She reall...

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...

Before I went out for the night on Saturday night, I decided to feed and water the spoods early. Catchy refused food, for only the second time since he arrived to my house. Since the last time he refused food I subsequently discovered that he had just molted, I let him be. And lo and behold, when I got back from London the following morning, there was a brand new moult hanging from the roof of his cage. I love seeing my critters after they molt - they get so much bigger and their markings change, so it's like getting a whole new critter every time. So on that note, here's Catchy in his brand new clothes.

Not really a full post but a happy note - Lucifer the Evil has kicked a molt out of his burrow! Lucifer is my Feather leg baboon spider. He is the one I am most scared of because he is a species known for a very nasty bite - five days of excruciating pain, spasms, and muscle cramps. As such, I do very little poking around his enclosure. He gets fed, obviously, and misted daily. But I haven't poked around. So when the first thing he did on arrival was burrow into the ground and hide, I was somewhat frustrated. For six weeks, I have been throwing pre-killed meal worms into what effectively looks like an empty tank, and I can't be sure that he is eating them. So to see a molt having been evicted from his burrow is a success - it shows he is still alive, and hopefully thriving. It would be nice to see him at some point though...

While I was rehousing the spoods the other day, one of the ones I rehoused was Anansi. When I lifted the bark hide, I discovered that he had molted again, the third time since he came to me. I had expected this - he had seriously over eaten previously, and then taken to hiding in isolation. What I wasn't expecting was how big he had gotten. He is absolutely gorgeous, and after Incy, is my biggest spood. He has surpassed both Lolth and Shelob. Just compare these photos of now versus when he first came home.

So, this makes me a little bit anxious. Today I noticed that Shelob was on her back. There's only one reason why a spider would be on their back, and that is molting. Usually, if they die, they die in situ, where they are standing. So I knew this was a molt. Now, I did have some warning that this was due. Firstly, she had stopped accepting any food. This is a classic spider sign of an impending molt, and combined with the second sign - the fact that she went into hiding under her water bowl - is known as "premolt". Shelob had been in premolt for about a week. So when I saw her upside down, I knew what was coming. I've never caught a spider in the act of molting before, and I really wish I could have stayed to watch, but I have children and life goes on. Ultimately I was unable to watch her, though I did take some photos if the various stages. I tried very hard not to disturb her, as I know they're very delicate at this stage, but I did manage to get this very shor...

Apologies if this upsets anyone, but today was a bad day. Tonight I lost my beautiful Winnie. My first sppod, the cutest little spood that ever was. I am absolutely devastated, and yes - I am crying. I don't know how or why she has passed. It was unexpected and very sudden. After all the stress of her over eating after the waxworm, she went into an unexpected molt about 10 to 14 days later. I kept an eye on her, checking and misting every day. Today at lunchtime she seemed to come out of her molt just fine - all limbs intact, seemingly no issues. I was so happy and felt I could finally relax - I took a photo and left her in her molting hammock excited to see her new clothes and slimmer waistline... But just a couple of hours later she was gone. I found her on the floor of her enclosure in a death curl. It is unusual for a spider to leave their molting hide after such a small amount of time. I had expected her to be in her molt hammock for at least four days, in line with the ...