Ally's Eight-Legged Journey

Less of a post and more of a random photo share - I was walking past Catchy's cage today, and she was looking at me in a peculiar manner, so I had to get a photograph: Not only did I find her posing interesting, but this photo shows a part of her anatomy that I'm very curious about - those shiny black bits in the segments of her abdomen. I've seen them several times before, but I never knew what they were. I've had a bit of a nose around Google since taking this photo, and apparently they're part of her threat display. Catchy has never displayed for me, so I don't know what her threat display looks like - the closest I can find online is this photo: Supposedly, they can inflate them to make themselves look bigger and scare off predators. Pretty cool!

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.

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...

I was recently asked to share pictures of my mantises rather than my spiders for a change (apparently my friends aren't as fond of the wee little beasties as I am, go figure!) I am always happy to oblige with pictures of my critters, regardless of what they are, so here are pictures of Sykes, Catchy, and Tyson. Unfortunately I lost Evander, my second flower mantis, recently. He went through a period of refusing to eat. No matter how many fruit flies I dropped into his enclosure, he just wasn't interested, and he passed right before I left for Amsterdam. I am obviously very disappointed, but this is nature and I tried my best. This is why mantises have so many babies - some of them just don't survive, it's called "failure to thrive". Sykes is my dead leaf mantis, Deroplatys desiccata . He's had two or three molts since I got him, but his rate of growth is so slow that I barely notice the difference at the moment. He's not much bigger than when I...

Well, I can't unsee it now. Ziggy popped his head out of his hide (presumably hoping for a spot of lunch) so I snapped this photo of him: He looks so big compared to when I first got him a couple of months ago, so I must be doing something right. He's definitely one of my favourites, aesthetically, even if I wouldn't touch him with a ten foot barge pole. But...When I was looking at the photo a little later on, I couldn't help but notice a passing resemblance to a certain blue muppet.... Ziggy reminds me of Uncle Deadly.... I mean, there are definitely worse muppets he could resemble, and Uncle Deadly is one of my favourites. So I'm not complaining. But I definitely can't unsee it now...

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.

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 -...

I love this picture of Big Spood. Big Spood is the largest of my spiders currently (Though I'm sure Incy will catch up quick!) so feeding is always a spectacle. Big Spood has a little dance that she does, which I call her "happy dance" whenever she gets a decent sized prey item. Unfortunately I've not yet been able to capture the dance - though I definitely will - so all I have to share are these photos. But oh my gosh, she looks so worried! Obviously, I know she's a spider and they don't exhibit emotions, but just look! Those look like some very concerned eyes! It amuses me to no end! Big Spood is fine though. I had just dropped a cricket into her enclosure, and she was coming out to see what was on the menu. She did catch the cricket - very quickly - but despite being ready with the camera, on this occasion I didn't see the happy dance. So have a photo of Big Spood standing over her food instead.... Her legs look pretty crooked, but I promise the...

Never am I more aware of the differences between mantises and spiders than during feeding time - feeding Catchy can be quite traumatic if you're an extremely empathetic person, or not used to how she feeds. It definitely opens up a whole host of questions regarding the ethics of keeping invertebrates as live foods for other pets. All of my invertebrates eat live food. That is their nature. And so I keep several sources of live food - usually fruit flies, green bottles, mealworms, and locusts. They all have enclosures, with hides, occasional spritzes for water, and fresh food. They're looked after as though they're my pets, but their ultimate fate is to be eaten by larger critters. My spiders kill their prey, albeit slowly, but injecting them with venom which paralyses them while their insides turn to mush. My scorpion at least does paralyse his prey, but he tears them apart whilst they're still alive and pre digests them on the floor. Catchy, unfortunately, just...

As part of my mission to feed all of the hungry spoods before Amsterdam, I threw a worm in to Ziggy this evening. I don't see Ziggy very often - he has dug himself a lovely series of tunnels under his bark hide, and for the most part he just sits in there. A bit strange, considering I thought he was an arboreal species, but I'm no expert in spider behaviour. But this means that if I see him out and about, then I know he's hungry. And tonight, he was out. Ziggy is one of my favourite spiders. I'm a little nervous of him, because he is very fast, and I know that if he bit me it would bloody well hurt - he's an Old World species of tarantula rather than a New World, which means that his primary defense mechanism (well, if running and hiding isn't an option) is venom. I really don't want him to bite me. But that said, I can't help but think he is a beautiful spider. His blue colouring is starting to develop, although it's not there yet, and I love...

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!

I will be going away in a few days - a weekend break to Amsterdam with my partner. I'm not worried about the critters at all, as I plan on spritzing them before I leave, and then that's all they should need until I get back. The biggest task is making sure that whoever wants to eat has eaten before I leave, so that none of them are too hungry. This is more important for the smaller ones, the slings and the smaller mantises, etc, as I'm assuming that their metabolisms are faster and that they can't go as long between meals as the larger ones. This is a big assumption based on mammals, mind. I am trying to get some decent feeding photos in the process, so hopefully there will be plenty to post over the upcoming few days. Unfortunately, Catchy wasn't at all interested in food on this occasion. She's pretty well fed and growing nicely, so it's not a cause for concern. But I was able to get this photograph, and when compared to a photo taken four months ag...

There was a post floating around my Facebook feed over the weekend that asked a very simple question: "Are there any arachnophobes out there who have been helped by jumping spiders?" This got me to thinking about my own situation, and the answer is....yes. I was as arachnophobic as it was possible to be for 30 years prior to my mission to get over it. I would freak out when ever I saw a spider sometimes I'd scream, sometimes I'd freeze, other times I would throw things. I would hallucinate spiders when awake and have nightmares when I was asleep. Some examples of how ridiculous my phobia got include: - There was once a time when my sister sent me a Facebook video that included a spider coming out from under a cabinet - I threw my phone across the work lunch room, and my manager had to pick it up and cancel the video for me because it was on a loop. I couldn't face it. - Another time I was playing World of Warcraft with my eyes shut because there was a spider ...

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.

Webster wasn't really due for a housing upgrade, if I'm entirely honest, but somebody bought me this amazing enclosure from Tarantula Cribs and I had to decide who to put in it. As it is an arboreal enclosure, that meant that the slings in arboreal pots were the only ones it was really suitable for - Lucifer, Asmodeus, or Webster. I am not putting my fingers into the enclosures of Asmodeus or Lucifer for all the Cribs in the world. As such, that left Webster. The benefits of putting Webster into this enclosure were mainly aesthetic. Firstly, Webster likes to web, so seeing it all webbed up will look awesome. Secondly, as Webster grows he will change colour, going from blue to purple, red and green. These colours would look amazing when backlit against the purple acrylic. And to be fair, his arboreal keeper was pretty boring, although he had made a rather impressive tunnel web in it. As with most of my recent rehousings, I opted for the natural look again. However, I did ...

Okay, now this is a little embarrassing. I mean, I thought nits would be bad, but locusts? While I was lying in bed last night I felt a little tickle on my head. I didn't really think anything of it, had a scritch, and pulled out.....this: What happened was that my daughter was carrying the invertarium which contains my live food by the handle on the lid. But it is a very old invertarium with a very loose lid. I told her to put it down and carry it round the bottom before the top popped off, but what I didn't realise was that it was already open... She put it on the side and left it there, so when I came back several hours later I found a swarm of locusts taking over my bedroom! I scooped them all up and put them back in the container, but clearly....I missed one.

Another rehousing! This time it is Ziggy (previously Poe). Ziggy was getting to the point where he could almost span the entire floor of his enclosure with his legs, and to be honest, his enclosure was pretty boring for an arboreal species. He was housed in the small Arboreal Keeper from the Spider Shop, but it really wasn't appropriate for him at this point. As he is an arboreal species, I wanted to get him something similar to what my mantises and jumping spiders are in, so again I turned to Amazon to get him this : Like my other enclosures, it was a flatpacked acrylic box that I needed to assemble myself, but it's top opening and has a nice strong magnetised lid so that he is unlikely to get out. Cork bark, spider plants, and moss for humidity are fast becoming my favourite decor items, as they offer a more naturalistic environment for the spiders. Yes, Fred has a castle, skulls and a coffin, but to be honest it is wasted on him as he tends to sit up in the corners far ...

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.

Another rehousing! This time it was Anansi, who was desperate for a new house. Not because of his size - he is still a large spiderling rather than a juvenile. However, following his admittance to the "Spider ICU", he had several more instances of mold in his enclosure. I came to the conclusion that coco fibre just wasn't for him. He's a more arid species, who likes it a bit drier, and so I set out looking for a sand based substrate for him. I didn't want to get just any old sand, in case he decided to burrow and it collapsed in on him. Instead, I opted for an arid tarantula substrate, which was sand based but clumped, allowing him to dig, mould, and shape to his hearts content. I added a small skull shaped hide for him, which he does use, and some moss which I allowed to dry out. He does get water, but I only put it in his water bowl, which I allow to overflow so that he has more of a humidity gradient. He can choose where to be in his enclosure accordin...