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.