Empty Eyes

One of my current longings is for better equipment and the skill to take really great pictures of insects and arachnids. Despite my lack of equipment and skill, I managed to take a picture of an exoskeleton from my newly molted Heteropoda boiei spider using my crappy old camera pressed against the eyepiece of my very small, inexpensive (but surprisingly nice) dissecting microscope. The result was quite decent.  I love the empty eyes left behind when arachnids molt.

Edit:  The next molt I got some more pictures like this, even better ones.

The tailess whip scorpion - Damon diadema, just after molting

I got some decent shots of my tailless whip scorpion, Damon diadema, just after it molted this last time.  They are so incredibly different looking just after a molt.  I like these shots because you can see the old exoskeleton, and get a sense of how the whole process works.  I haven't been lucky enough to catch mine at the beginning of a molt.  There is also an amazing video of one of these guys that shows the entire molt, I highly recommend it, complete with super awesome, weird music.  You can find it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uzuYRY2faQ

I have always wondered, do insects and arachnids that molt have any control over when it happens, or does it simply happen when it happens?  My tarantulas will build complex hammocks to lay in when they molt, so clearly they know it's coming, but can they decide, hey today seems safe, let's do it?  Of course I don't really believe they have a thought process like this, but I still wonder if they have any control at all over when the process begins.

Here are my shots of Critter:

Featured tarantula - Hapalopus sp. Columbia

This beautiful girl pictured below is my Hapalopus sp. Columbia, large morph. She is a captive bred tarantula, like all my arachnids, and comes from Tarantula Canada (tarantulacanada.com).  I got her as a 1/4 inch spiderling in April of 2016, so she has done very well, she is probably about an inch in leg span now, and has molted three times since April, and she is likely due for another one soon.  I keep her just at room temperature, which in my room tends to be between 22 Celsius and 24 daytime and 20 or so at night (I don't provide extra heat for any of my tarantulas and they seem to do fine). She likes to web her container fairly extensively, mostly sheets on the ground as you can see in the picture, and doesn't seem interested in burrowing at all, though others have reported a lot of burrowing by this species. I keep a water dish in the form of a coke bottle lid in one corner and over fill it whenever it gets low. I keep her currently in a size small critter keeper. I know people tend to keep spiderlings in vials (pillbottles), but I find my tarantulas do just fine in larger spaces.  When it's time to feed them, if they are having trouble chasing down their prey, I use a small paint brush to usher the prey towards them to make it easier for them to catch.  I don't like the idea of my arachnids having really small habitats, and I find this is a good compromise.

Just some really awesome spiders

I recently had the pleasure to travel to Victoria, Canada, and spend some time on a rural property.  Every evening I did the spider tour, walking around to the various buildings and looking for spiders. I didn't have to look very hard, the density of spiders was incredible. There are a few photos here courtesy of my mother as well, the daytime ones, that are far superior quality.  I am not much of a photographer, and these are all cellphone shots, but I think they are pretty cool. Enjoy!

Spider party?!

Beautiful Web

Lunch

Mating dance

Hole in the wall

Shiny eyes

Caught a fly - I think these guys are Spoke Wheel Spiders or Segestriidae pacifica.

Spider meets isopod - Segestriidae pacifica

Just legs - Segestriidae pacifica

Little cutie

On a string

You can see the obvious pedipalp boxing gloves of the male.

Division in the Ranks

If you think getting a all-night-music playing, defaulted on the rent, garbage hoarding tenant to move out of your house is hard, try getting an ant colony to move out of a filthy, fungus encrusted, dried up old test tube! I have tried applying heat (usually with catastrophic results due to condensation), applying light, and bashing the tube with something metal to make a horrible noise and vibration.  I have also tried the old be really patient and just wait tactic.  That one seems to take months.  What is it about the moldy old test tube that they cling to so vehemently? I guess us humans do that to, always a bit afraid of change, aren't we?

I find the queen can be much more stubborn than her workers when it comes to moving on. This is where the real hierarchy in ant colonies becomes clear. Queens don't actually rule the kingdom, telling their workers what to do.  Instead the whole colony acts as a super-organism. Or does it?

I have been trying to get a colony of Lasius ants to move out of a really disgusting tube that is dangerously contaminated with mold (that I think came from a maggot that they insisted on carrying into the tube). Well, as you will see in the picture below, the three workers have all moved into the new tube, two days ago! The queen is still hanging out in the old tube, snorting up fungal spores. The workers, to anthropomorphize, seem to be staring longingly in the direction of the wayward mother, as if she is just not functional enough to make an intelligent decision about where she should be.

Those Hairy, Scary Tarantulas

When I got started with arachnid and insect pets, I had no intentions of getting any tarantulas.  After a few orders from tarantulacanada.com, my all time favorite source of critters, they sent me a free tarantula.  The non-intimidating kind, just a quarter of an inch big.  Tiny, pink, and positively not scary.  Easing me in, they were, like the drug dealer giving away dime bags of coke to unsuspecting children. I was however, quite horrified at getting that first tarantula, especially since I wasn't expecting it.  But it was quite cute, in a weird sort of way, so I kept it, as well as the 3 other freebie tarantulas they sent me over the next several months. I began to really look forward to the surprises they sent me. Well I have seven tarantulas now, my four freebies and three dwarfs ordered on purpose.  While most of them are still acceptably small, the first two freebies are now large.  Large for me anyway, 2.5 inches from tip of toe to tip of toe. I am a little freaked out by these not so small tarantulas,  In fact, I have one of them on kijiji even as we speak.  A girl contacted me the other day expressing interest in buying one of them.  She asked me if I handled them, and I said "No, I think they could be handled, they are quite mellow, but it just isn't my thing."  This was putting it mildly.  She sent me back a picture of herself, holding a much larger tarantula in her hand.  This prompted my response, "That would make me scream like a small child." She asked how old I was. She was probably shock to discover that I am probably 2X her age.

Today I tried to move one of these suckers out of her old enclosure into a new, bigger, better one, in preparation for sale.  Well the darn thing ended up skittering around my desk, much faster than I would have believed possible for a critter that normally lumbers like a cow in labor.  Fortunately I caught it, after squealing like a 5 year old for awhile.  Nope, truth is I am not that keen on the big tarantulas, call me a wimp if you wish, I don't mind.  I will stick with my mantids, whip-spiders, jumping spiders, etc.  And the dwarf tarantulas, there are some really beautiful, colorful dwarfs.  Oh, and Avicularia tarantulas (they are more like little ballerinas than spiders).  I still look forward to my surprises from Tarantula Canada, and I really like watching the tiny little spiderlings grow into recognizable tarantulas, but once they get a certain size, well, pet spider anyone?

Jennifer, Hairy and Scary

They are having sex all around you!

By they I mean ants, of course, it's nuptial flight season!  I wish knew how to remove the sound from the following video, my geeky-overexcited-10 year old voice is pretty annoying, but the views of queens and drones (not the electronic kind) emerging is pretty cool:

Only a few days later there were more nuptial flights. I didn't actually observe any of the ants emerging or flying, but was lucky to catch 4 queens. My wife spotted the first queen on our window sill in the living room.  Yup, the queen was nice enough to make things really easy for me and come right into my house.  Not only that, when I placed my container in front of her, she walked right in.  She looks very much like a Camponotus (carpenter ant), though I wouldn't have expected to find anymore of these girls at this time of year.  When I put her in the test tube set up, she did what all the Camponotus queens I have found did, and started diligently trying to remove the cotton:

In the past when I have found queens I have found a whole bunch of a single species.  This time I found only a few of three different species.  Finding the queen inside the house, I immediately ran outside hoping to find more.  I found a couple of more regular sized queens pretty quickly.  Working further up a lane, I spotted an almost worker sized ant that was behaving like a queen - workers tend to move in a zig-zag, random pattern, as they search for food.  Queens tend to run more in a straight line. I decided to grab her.  She went ballistic inside the container, which made me even more convinced she was probably a worker, but decided to hang onto her just in case.  When I moved all four ants into test tube setups, the little ant did the weirdest thing I have yet seen an ant do.  She hit the wet cotton and immediately died.  She completely stopped moving, and looked kind of splayed out, as if I had squashed her.  I watched her for quite awhile and was convinced that was the end of her. I took her back outside to dispose of her by tapping her out of the tube. When she fell out, she hit the ground running! With some effort I caught her again. Under the microscope her wing scars proved her to be of royal heritage.  Here is a shot of my little red queen and the other two types I found for size comparison:

If you are laughing your head off at this point about all this ant-geekiness, and thinking I am just a nut, well selling ants this past year paid for my purple car!  Granted, it's not exactly a Mercedes, but still, my ants bought me a car, how cool is that!

What's great about having insects/arachnids for pets? Well for one, no poop!

I would say having a house full of insect/arachnid pets is a lot less work than having a dog, about the same as having a cat, and probably less than having an aquarium full of fancy fish.  The big advantage of insects/arachnids, as the title says, is there is rarely a need to clean up poop.  You would have quite a challenging time even finding poop to clean up.  Because most of my critters live in containers lined with some kind of substrate, mostly coconut choir mixed with peat moss and vermiculite, the poop simply composts on site and disappears. The work is in maintaining humidity and in finding food for them all. I say finding food, rather than feeding them, because feeding them is quite entertaining, and doesn't feel like work.  But finding the food can be quite challenging.  Tiny 1/4 spiderlings require fruit flies or at most, week old crickets.  My Avicularia spiderling prefers maggots.  My larger tarantulas eat larger crickets.  The rule of thumb is the length of the cricket should not exceed the length of the spiders abdomen:

Jennifer's Abdomen

My Mantids really like moths, that I collect from around my back porch light.  I am nervous about feeding wild-caught insects because they may have been tainted with pesticides, but so far it hasn't caused a problem. Fruit flies are not always that easy to get, but once you have them it is easy and inexpensive to maintain a culture. I periodically contemplate raising my own crickets, but quickly dismiss the idea.  Crickets are smelly and once they get to sexual maturity, loud. But sometimes you go to the store to get some, and they just don't have any, or the ones they have are all too big.  Or sometimes, they are all dead. Fortunately, unlike a cat or a dog that really doesn't tolerate being without food for long, most of my critters can go several weeks without food without any harm.  The exception would be the mantids that seem to need to eat regularly, and the ant colonies which need an input of calories pretty much all the time (with the exception of queens that don't have workers yet, they can live for over a year without eating - I know this because I have queens that haven't eaten in that long). The ants can be left with supplies for quite awhile though, as long as it things like honey and seeds that won't go moldy.

My critters take up a chunk of most of my evenings, after my son has gone to bed.  Some nights I am just too tired and other than making sure the mantids have a misting of water (they don't really go in for water dishes), I don't pay any attention to any of them.  Try doing that with a dog!

And then there were three

I started out with about 30 mantids. I sold quite a number of them, lost a few to actual deaths (as opposed to a lot of just playing dead).  The number one killer of mantids seems to be molting accidents.  Molting is the process of shedding the exoskeleton so they can grow. This is a really vulnerable time for them, definitely a time when they could be eaten by predators out in the real world.  In my house I lost a few because I just wasn't paying attention when I picked up their containers to feed them, and disturbing a molting mantis will usually result in it falling. Having hit the ground, it's exoskeleton will harden into a position not conducive to continued existence.  Poor Rambo though, so named because he had already survived a number of difficult mantis-life experiences (including three days wandering my house on his own), simply chose a poor location to molt.  He was too near the ground and so as he shed his skin, hanging upside down as they do, he hit the dirt in the bottom of his container before be managed to completely shed his skin.  This mangled his poor head and body, and I put him in the freezer to end his suffering.

Rest in peace (or pieces?) poor Rambo.  Note the old exoskeleton still clinging to the bottom of his body.

The three that are left, Stripey, CrazyPants and No-Name, are living a charmed existence, and are ridiculously entertaining. These tiny cats love to groom themselves and love to sit on people.  As soon as they see me, I swear, they just want out so they can inhabit my person.  They really are keen on people. You wouldn't think an insect brain would even note the existence of people.  Certainly my tarantulas do not consider me to be of the same universe as they are.  But the mantids clearly enjoy my company - see accompanying images!

"I'm so tired from eating that yummy maggot, mind if I just use your hand as a lawn chair for awhile?  By the way, you should clean your fingernails!"

"While I am here, I may as well clean up the maggot-related toe-jam."

Keeping Carnivorous Pets

I am that kind of person, the kind that will collect a house fly, spider, wasp, bee, basically anything that finds it's way into the house, in a cup and take it outside rather than killing it.  Well mostly the spiders I just leave inside, or if it is particularly interesting, I will capture it to keep inside and observe for awhile before releasing.  I really have no interest in killing anything, with the notable exception of ticks.  Ticks I hate, and will happily not only kill, but perhaps torture, just a little, along the way.  Getting a pet that needed to be fed something alive was something I really didn't think I could ever do.  Now I have a house full of them. It was a weird transition, the first arachnid I got, I would go to the pet store and buy a single cricket to bring home and feed.  I didn't want anymore in the house than that, and I struggled with throwing that cricket in, and did not enjoy seeing it consumed. Now I have to remind myself to give the crickets basic care, remind myself that they are in fact living creatures, not just food. I have become so desensitized to their plight, that I often go to get some from their container and realize they have no source of water.  Then I get angry with myself for treating them so badly. At the same time, I cannot bring myself to crush their heads, as is sometimes recommend for feeding spiderlings to prevent the cricket from harming very small and fragile spiders.  Instead the spiderlings get fruit flies.  I myself eat meat, so I recognize the hypocrisy, but I still cannot do it.

A year after I acquired my first arachnid, I have come to quite enjoy watching my spiders catch their prey, the excitement of watching their incredible hunting skills. They are generally really quick though, they inject venom that I like to imagine knocks the prey out and that's the end of it (I have no basis in fact for this assumption).  The mantids are a whole different story.  The 6 mantids I have left (the rest have been sold or given away) have gotten big enough to switch from fruit flies to maggots.  Tonight I really couldn't watch them eat their first maggots.  Mantids definitely do not kill their prey swiftly.  They eat pretty much everything they catch like a cob of corn, from the middle.  So those poor maggots suffer and struggle while the mantis starts at their mid section. I am very glad that I am far to big to die and the hands of a mantis.

I still take flies, spiders, wasps and bees out of the house and release them.

Praying Mantis Playing Dead

One of my mantids suddenly died.  It was a shocking situation, I barely touched the poor dude, and he just keeled over and was no more.  I couldn't figure out how this possibly could have killed him, but after poking at him a bit to confirm he really was gone, I put him aside to deal with later (does this remind of you of the drowned ant story?).  About 15 minutes later, he was not so dead.  So I looked up praying mantis playing dead on google.  I found one site with photos of a much large mantis playing dead and then looking quite alive, here:
http://www.drybrushwet.com/nature/praying-mantis-playing-dead/

and a very obscure reference, reference to a reference really, in the book

The Optical Unconscious

By Rosalind E. Krauss,

Krauss refers to writing by Roger Calloisa, French intellectual writer, who remarked that the mantis was capable of feigning death even when decapitated, and therefore, essentially dead.  Being able to pretend to be dead when you are, kind of already dead, is quite a feat indeed.  

I didn't try decapitating any of my mantids to test this out, but I did manage to get a very obvious playing dead and reawakening video, which is above, I apologize for the quality of the video, I will try to improve on it later.  I am really falling for these insects that are such incredible characters.  More to follow on the wonders of the praying mantis.

Spiders are people too . . . .

Spiders are people too . . . .well no, of course they are not.  I have decidedly less than 8 legs, my canines, closest thing I have to fangs, got worn down years ago, and I am pretty sure I have no venom to inject anyway. I am not a spider, and a spider is not me. But the reason that this statement popped into my head is the concept that people tend to have of not-people.  For instance, in my family, my parents liked pure-bred spaniels.  They believed that if they got a pure-bred spaniel, they knew exactly what kind of dog they were getting, reasonably laid back, good with children, not too much barking, etc.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.  There were some great dogs, but there was one springer spaniel that we had to find a home for because it kept chasing cars, and another that had to be put down because it turned on my dad, unprovoked, and bit his arm badly enough to require stitches.  People seem to have a belief that a particular species of animal will come with a particular temperament and set of behaviors. You see this all the time when you look up species of tarantula on the internet.  You will find a care sheet that says that X species of tarantula is docile, rarely kicks hairs, good for beginners, or that Y species of tarantula is very defensive and will strike multiple times if threatened.  These aren't bad guidelines, and are probably generally true, but just like people, and dogs, spiders also have their own individual personalities.  I was prompted to write about this today, because I have a particularly extreme example occurring in my own house right now. I ordered two Hapalopus sp. spiderlings from TarantulaCanada.com.  They would have been from the same egg sac, I am guessing, but they couldn't be more different.

They come in a pill-bottle sized container, wrapped in a bit of gauze.  I pulled the first gauze out, and gently opened it up in the container that was to be "Lucius's" home.  Well, Lucius decided that it would be fun to run amok, and before I knew it, he was up the side of the container and down the other side and running laps around my bathroom counter top and up across the mirror.  I was chasing him all over, trying frantically to trap him under the container he came in before he managed to hit the floor and head for the rest of the house.  After I got him back in his pill bottle, I made a quick change to a taller, thinner container for him to live in, one that I hoped I could get closed before he streaked up the side and went AWOL again.  After I got him settled, I really thought, did I bite off more than I can chew this time?  I have two of these crazy things! I had tried to research this particular species before ordering, but hadn't found much about them.  The second one I opened with a great deal more caution, but I needn't have worried, getting this one to lumber out of the gauze and onto the soil took a very long time, and then he only went a few steps off the gauze and froze.  Since then, Lucius has mostly been hanging upside down on the screen at the top of the container, and has absolutely slaughtered the fruit flies and cricket that I have introduced.  Neville on the other hand, has taken up residence in his little coke-bottle-lid hiding spot and hasn't even peaked a leg out in 3 days.

The craziness of ant queen collecting

My wife sent me a text after lunch saying she had found me a really big ant queen on her lunch break, and put it in one of her lunch containers to bring home.  This was incredibly surprising to me, because it is hot and dry today, and hasn't rained in a long time.  Ant nuptial flights seem to occur a day or two after a big rain, so I wouldn't have expected any flights today at all.  From her description it sounded like a Camponotus, which I didn't expect to find in the city ever.  Excited beyond belief that I might be able to find some more, I raced out of the house, sans shoes, and sure enough 10 feet from my door, there was a queen.  Not wanting to miss the window of opportunity I continued to walk around and around my house in a wide semi-circle looking for more.  I can only imagine how insane I must look to my neighbors, who already don't speak to me.  Walking back and forth, up and down the same chunk of side walk, no shoes on, occasionally getting on all fours and chasing something around that they can't see from their vantage point, with a pill bottle.  Then shoving the pill bottle in my pocket and repeating.  Not as bad as the days I bike very slowly through the park on my way home from work, where all my neighbors stroll with their well behaved dogs and children, and then suddenly throw my bike down on the ground and insanely try to find the containers in my backpack, interrupt the flow of pathway traffic, again looking for something tiny on the sidewalk that others can't even see.  More than once I have been asked if I am alright, and when I look up and grinning at them and say "I am fine, I am just collecting ant queens", I am pretty sure they conclude that I am not alright at all!

It was killing me that I couldn't walk further afield, but you see, I am expecting a shipment of spiders today from Montreal, and the delivery man hasn't shown up yet.  I did manage to find three ant queens, and with the one my wife found, that makes four.  Unfortunately they were incredibly hard to convince into the containers, and I might have injured one of them in the process.  They are such incredibly beautiful queens!  Check out the size comparison below between one of my newly collected Camponotus queens (top) and a Tapinoma queen from last summer.

Size comparison Camponotus (top), Tapinoma (bottom).

Me vs. Praying Mantids

There are martial arts moves that were modeled after the moves that a praying mantis makes.  The story goes that a monk named Wang Lung was bothered by the sound of a mantis striking a cricket.  He then observed the mantis (and had a little fight with him) and subsequently developed some pretty nasty moves. The mantis is a master at combat apparently.

A couple of guys named Sam and Si produced a video measuring the strike time for a praying mantis vs. the strike time for a human.  They filmed a few different species of praying mantids striking at prey and then calculated the number of seconds it took.  Here are the results:

Polyspilota griffinii - 0.039 sec
Alalomantis muta - 0.057 sec
Phyllocrania paradoxa - 0.027 sec

Then they tried a young, fit human striking with a similar pose.  His time was .0805, much slower.

You can see the video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cch4aE3Oon0

Run!!!

What are you looking at?

This explains the difficultly I have been having in caring for 30 baby mantids that recently hatched in my house.  They are each separated into their own Safeway deli containers.  Each day I have to pry off the lid, making a careful note of where the mantis is in the container, usually upside down on the lid, and get a couple of fruit flies in there, and a small spritz of water, and get the container closed again before the mantis either runs up my arm or jumps to potential freedom and makes off down the hallway.  They are only about centimeter long right now, but they seem to be able to jump straight up at least a foot.  And the second they sense the container is open, they start trying to escape.  Of course, so do the fruit flies.  The fruit flies have the advantage that I care more about the mantids escaping then I do about them escaping.  After all, there are a few stray spiders around that can take care of the fruit flies later.

I can attest to what the youtube video addresses, the mantids are faster than I am (and possibly smarter too).

On ant queens with missing antennae, and ant euthanasia

I have read a few accounts on the survival and success of queen ants that are missing one antennae, and there seems to be varying outcomes, from "nope, died right away" to "did fine, established a flourishing colony".  I decided to weigh in with my own two experiences.  The first queen I found with only one antennae was a beautiful golden orange color, and I wanted her to survive so badly, but after only a couple of days she died.  I don't know if it was antennae related or not, she had no other damage that I could see. The second one was one of about 15 queens I caught in a single day of the species Tapinoma sessile, or the odorous house ant, known for emitting a rotting stench when they feel threatened.  All of these queens produced numerous eggs on the first go, and the first nantics (the first ants born to a queen) have started to eclose and they are very tiny compared to the other species of ants that I have.  My one-antennae queen also produced a large number of eggs and seemed to be doing just fine, grooming them, caring for them just like the others.  I was optimistic that she would create a thriving colony. THEN one day she went on a murderous rampage and turned all of her eggs into mashed potatoes!  She had the exact same environment and same care as her sister queens of the same species, so I really can only blame her one-antennae status for the disturbing behavior.

I decided to put her out of her misery.  The most humane way to kill insects is to freeze them.  As I discovered, this is a little trickier with ants than some other types of insects.  I put her in the freezer for about 30 minutes.  Took her out and set her aside to clean the tube up later.  But later she was back grooming herself looking pretty darned healthy.  I put her in the freezer again, this time for 2 hours.  Same thing happened!  Not wanting to do her in with any other method, I simply put her back with the others.  She has since produced another large brood of eggs, much to my dismay.  I wonder what will happen next?  I may have a serial killer living in my house.

Turns out that ants that live in colder climates produce glycerol that acts as an anti-freeze and makes it possible for them to survive the harsh winters of the Canadian climate.  My queen, one brick short of a load, apparently has it all together when it comes to the cold.

Margaret and her babies

This is Margaret:
Margaret is a Pholcus phalangioides, or a cellar spider.  These spiders were originally an import from Europe, but can now be found all over North America, mostly hanging out in basements.

Yes, in this picture, Margaret is hanging onto a writhing ball of legs.  I don't think anyone who is afraid of spiders would find their way here to begin with, but if you did, you are probably not feeling very comfortable right now.

This appears to be a blog mostly about my mistakes.  Margaret's egg sac was obvious for weeks before it became all squirmy.  And what did I do about it?  Well not much, I guess I wasn't even sure it was fertile (I did not breed Margaret, and from the time she came to me from a breeder until the egg sac popped out, she was all by herself).  And I had no desire for spider babies, I definitely did not ask for a possibly pregnant spider to be sent my way. Anyway, the eggs hatched and about 30 babies came out, and what did I do about it then?  Not much.  They had a lot of space to spread out, and they were too tiny for me to catch anyway, and truly, I just didn't know what to do about them.  They seemed to stick fairly close to their mother so I thought I would just wait and see what happened. Well, after a few weeks there were none.  Or so I thought.  I assumed they had cannibalized each other.  Then one night I happened to be looking up towards the ceiling, and I could see them, tiny (but not as tiny as they were) little spiders all around the edge of the room where the ceiling meets the wall, about 5 inches apart. I could see several of them were eating up the fruit flies that regularly escape.  Even for a spider lover, this was a little much to take.  I won't tell you what came next, it wasn't pretty.

Pet stores and tarantulas

I frequent a few pet shops on a regular basis, for entertainment, to pass the time, and to buy crickets.  One pet store I go to frequently had a Avicularia avicularia, a pinktoe tarantula.  They had her in a very large glass aquarium, with no side ventilation, sitting on sand, with nothing to climb on.  Anyone who knows anything about keeping Avics knows this is a really bad idea.  Everything is wrong about this setup.  I saw her and felt sad.  I kind of wanted to rescue her, but that seemed like a bad idea, because the store would probably replace her with another one, and treat it badly as well.  I wanted to say something, to write a letter, to jump up and down and complain, but I am just not that assertive.  After seeing her in a sorry state for about 2 months, I decided to take her home, knowing it was a stupid idea.

When I bought her, I mentioned to the sales guy that she was inappropriately housed, and described how she should be housed.  He claimed that he just hadn't had time yet to fix up her housing.  I didn't say anything about how I had watched her for 2 months.  When I got her home it was clear that she wasn't well.  I tried tarantula ICU off and on for a number of days, trying to get her sufficiently re-hydrated.  She did rally for a little while, even did a little webbing.  Then she settled down on the substrate and got progressively worse.  Another round of spider ICU did nothing, and finally she did the tarantula death curl.

Here she is when she was about as well as she ever got in my care:

A very beautiful spider!

Pet stores generally seem to keep tarantulas in inappropriate ways.  They often don't seem to know or care whether the animal was captive bred or wild caught.  I asked a sales person in a different store about whether or not a particular spider was wild caught or not, and he said well of course it was, you couldn't breed them in captivity.  I then listed two different breeders of said species, and he just kind of mumbled and moved on.

The moral of the story is, don't buy arachnids from pet stores, go to a reputable breeder!  (I will take my own advice in the future).

The problem with plexiglass

In addition to keeping ants I also keep true spiders, tarantulas, mantids, isopods and the occasional beetle.  I am fairly new to all of it, and apparently still have quite a lot to learn.  The dog is the only thing straightforward.  She is pretty much self-keeping really.  She bugs me when she wants to be fed or let out, and barks to come in.  She reminds me in the evening that she needs some exercise, by prodding me with her nose until I give in.  But the rest of the creatures are not quite so self-supporting.  I have two plexiglass cages, one I bought used off kijiji that is clearly a tarantula enclosure, with a lock, the other I made myself.  The second was really is quite sharp looking.  Or it was, until the warping began.  The bought one has warped so that it really doesn't close very well, but I thought it was still pretty secure. However, Fred, the Carolina wolf spider, Hogna carolinensis, somehow managed to get out of it last night.

Fred, the missing arachnid

He is a really big dude, fully mature, and I just don't know how he managed to squeeze his butt out, especially since he cannot climb smooth surfaces.  Nonetheless he is gone as of this morning, and part of my work day is going to be taking up with trying to find him, before someone else in my household does and is not very pleased with me!

The other cage, the one I made, has an orb web spider in it, who is also a bit of an escape artist, but lately she is an eating machine and doesn't seem to have any interest in leaving.  Plus when she does escape she always goes to exactly the same place (3X now, out of 3 different containers), the top of the bookshelf, where she makes a web that won't catch anything (except maybe Fred now).

Anyway, I am very disappointed in how much plexiglass warps, and I won't be buying or making any more cages out of it for that reason!

Update:  Fred has apparently caught a flight back to Carolina, because he is not in my house anywhere!

Parasitic fly

Ants Canada produced a video about Strongygaster globula, an endoparasite of Lasius neoniger, Lasius niger, and Lasius alienus. The video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLpz-B9T4F8&nohtml5=False

I seem to have one of these guys as well.  I have a few Lasius alienus queens for sure, so this queen is probably another of them.  She overwintered and didn't produce any eggs, long after her sisters had begun to produce.  Then one day, suddenly, there was a thing that looked kind of like a pupae, but about 3 times larger than the ones produced by the other queens.  My wife suggested maybe she had produced a drone, and that made sense, as apparently unfertilized queens sometimes do this.  But then I remembered having seen that video a long time ago, so I looked it up again today, and sure enough, that is what the thing growing with my queen looks like, and her gaster does seem a bit shriveled.  Poor girl, she is busy tending to it like it's one of her babies.  I have only been observing my ants under red light, and under that light the parasite looks the same color as the pupae, but not that I have taken the test tube out into the light, it looks much more orange than normal ant pupae.  Can't wait to see the fly emerge.

One almost disaster gives me the knowledge to fix a real disaster

A while back I tried to get a queen to move her brood out of a moldy test tube.  I tried light and it did nothing.  I applied heat, but didn't watch closely enough.  The heat created condensation, and when I came back, it appeared that the queen had drowned.  I felt horrible!  I put her on my table, to dispose of later.  When I came back a few hours later, she was busy cleaning her larvae, looking no worse for wear.  Lesson learned, be very careful with heat, and ants don't drown very easily.

Well last night I gave a little honey to a queen with two nantics that looked ready to eat.  I thought I gave them a reasonable amount, but clearly I was wrong!  The next day I found the two workers literally glued to themselves, antenna glued to their heads, their legs gummed up and stuck to their bodies.  Seriously bad mistake!  They had tracked honey everywhere.  The queen still looked fine, and three more pupae looked okay, but possibly a little stuck in some honey.  I felt horrible, especially seeing the two workers still alive, but clearly suffering.  A couple hours later the situation looked even more dire, with one worker not moving at all, and the other twitching, antennae still stuck firmly to it's head.  What to do?  When I am sticky I take a bath.  My previous experience with the queen I thought I had drowned combined with some reading that told me that while ants will drown, they can actually close their spiracles for a time to prevent water entering allowing them to survive submerged for a awhile.  I felt that I didn't have much to lose.  I took a syringe and carefully flooded the test tube with water, and then drained it out again.  The queen struggled for a bit, and then everybody just looked dead.  An hour later, everybody looked completely fine!  They are very busy grooming themselves and each other, and they look no worse for wear, antennas wriggling happily in the air.  I don't know about the state of the pupae, won't know that for awhile probably.  There might also be some residual damage to the queen and the two workers, but so far so good.

Lots of lessons learned!  Be careful with the honey, you can always add more, but it is much harder to take away if you add too much.

How it started

I have always having liked pets, but mostly I have had the furry kind.  I have a dog named Annie, and for awhile I had some mice named Blaze and Zoey.  I really liked the mice, but after awhile the coughing and sneezing began, and got worse and worse.  Fortunately mice don't live that long, and I was able to provide them with a good home for their entire life time.

Once they were gone I did obscene amounts of research into my next pet, with worries about my allergies crossing over to other species.  I looked at hedgehogs, but thought their heat requirements were too complicated.  Birds, too messy and loud, and live too long! I looked at other rodent species, hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, but worried to much about allergies.  I thought about reptiles, but again, their environmental requirements are quite complicated.  Then quite by accident I came across TarantulaCanada.com.  This was pretty exciting, no allergy problems here!  I wasn't at all interested in keeping tarantulas, but Tarantula Canada has a few other really cool creatures, like Amblypygi, commonly know as whipspiders, or tailess whip scorpions.

The first Amblypygi I got, a captive bred Damon diadema, got stuck in the mail and died a few days after arrival.  The second one made it to me on time, and has been thriving ever since.  I now have four of them. This led to other arachnids, and eventually, even a couple of (very tiny) tarantulas.  Fascinated by my new hobby, and driven by my ADHD, which tends to make me quite obsessed about one particular topic at a time, I was researching insects and arachnid pets like crazy, and found the AntsCanada.com website.  Well from the second I found it, I was hooked, I had to have an ant colony.  AntsCanada has a GAN (Global Ant Nursery) project that looked really cool, but with no GAN farmers in my area, that was out.  So I started looking everywhere for ant queens.

By the end of the summer I had over a hundred of them in test tubes in my dresser drawers.  Good thing my wife is tolerant of my new hobby.  I knew I would not be able to keep all these ants, so I signed up to be a GAN farmer myself.  That was in the fall, and only two of my queens produced eggs before winter.  One of them wasn't quite right - she ate her babies as they tried to eclose.  The other produced 3 workers that over wintered.  Over the winter I lost a bunch of queens, probably ones that were not fertile.  I hibernated my ants in a cold windowsill in the basement for about 3 months.  When I brought them out of hibernation, a population explosion occurred.  Currently I have about 30 colonies with either workers, larvae, pupae or eggs, or some combination of the above.  I sold my first colony a couple of weeks ago!  I hope I can sell more, because I really can't keep all of these ants, but I enjoy checking them every night and seeing their progress.  I check them with my room completely dark, and using a red LED light, so I don't disturb them too much.  They don't seem to even notice I am there.  Apparently a disturbed ant queen may eat her eggs. But it would take the fun out of it for me if I could only check them every couple of weeks.