Margaret's babies live on and on and on

I am such a formative blogger, some days two or even three people look at my blog! Blogger stats tell me the referring URL's of people visiting my site.  Apparently some of my readers come here via http://cuckoldqueens.com.  That has to be legit right? I don't recommend clicking on that link.

You might remember my most popular post here:
http://formicidaekeeper.blogspot.ca/2016/04/margaret-and-her-babies.html

If not I will refresh your memory. Margaret the cellar spider's (Pholcus phalangiodes)
babies freely distributed themselves all over my house before I realized what was happening. And I, the person who lovingly takes each wayward fly out of my house and releases it rather than swatting it, decimated them. I just couldn't have them procreating (which as it turns out they do quite quickly and efficiently) all over my house (which doesn't belong to me and whose next occupant may not appreciate dozens of spiders everywhere).

However finding them all has proven to be quite a challenge. For a number of weeks there was a very adult looking one living in the corner of my room.  I naively thought "that must be the last one, I will leave it be, it can't make babies all by itself".

Then there were two, hanging around together, because these spiders, it turns out, are more social than most spider species. And one of those two was holding onto an egg sac, which I recognize quite quickly now as the spider equivalent of a live hand grenade. I am afraid the incestuous twosome joined their siblings in oblivion.

A few weeks later my wife found one behind a chair in the living room, and I found another one in my room. Not being able to bear any more bloodshed (so to speak because it's always death by freezing, the most humane way to kill an insect or arachnid), I captured both of them and put them in critter keepers. The thinking was, of course, these MUST be the last two in the house, I could just hang onto them, they are after all very cool spiders in their own way. One of the interesting features of these spiders is if they feel threatened they will start to vibrate and bounce up and down in their web so fast that it is no longer possible to see them. This fools would-be predators into thinking they have disappeared (or that they are too crazy to bother with) and makes you feel a little dizzy trying to watch them.

Margaret's last surviving offspring. Maybe. Looking all creepy on my closet ceiling.

But I have zero space left in my spider room, which also happens to be my office and the place where I dry out my caving gear, and the place where I put anything I don't know where else to put. Cages and containers line every horizontal surface now, and my ant colonies are sitting on top of my vinegaroon containers. So, I froze one of the last two cellar spiders (really I am sure they are the last), and in a moment of weakness and stupidity, released the other one to wander the house, in search of a mate that with my luck it will probably find, if it's not already a pregnant female. Why my wife puts up with me is a bit of a mystery. It's a good thing she is a biologist who appreciates these creatures even if she isn't terribly interested in taking care of them herself. If I ever lose her, I will be like one of those elderly single women who has a million cats, only I will be an old man with a hundred spiders instead. At least my house won't stink of cat pee.

Escapes do happen - Sparassidae spp.

I have had a few escaped spiders and ant queens now. Mostly they happen when you are transferring a spider from one home to another, you expect this to happen and you can deal with them pretty quickly by having a plastic deli cup close by. Some of my escapes happened not when transferring but when the containers proved not be perfectly suited to the creature, such as my wolf spider (Hogna carolinensis) spider Fred, who pried himself between two layers of plexiglass and made a permanent escape, or my false black widow spider (Steatoda gross), Mavis who disappeared through the gap in the lid of a terrarium never to be seen or heard from again, like socks in a dryer. And there are still a few of Margaret's babies wandering around the house, if you recall one of my previous posts.

My spider room also happens to by my guest room, and more than once I have lied to house guests about having never had any escapees. There is no point in frightening people when all of my spiders are basically harmless anyway, right?  Jenn, I hope you aren't reading this right now, but if you are please forgive me, nothing bad happened, right??

But yesterday's escape of my huntsman spider (Sparassidae spp.), Ginger, was particularly unique, and a little problematic. The top of Ginger's container is attached with Velcro.  Usually the noise of prying off the lid is enough to send her running for cover, but yesterday for some reason, as I was flipping the lid off, she flipped herself over and somehow launched herself at the lid, then ran off of it and down the container, across the desk and up into the bucket that I keep my crickets in before I could blink.  Huntsmen are stupid fast. I guess she really was hungry, because she immediately caught and started consuming a cricket.  Problem was she was now in container with very rounded sides, and every time I tried to corner her with a deli container she simply ran out the gaps on the top of it, and headed for the opening, where (panicking only slightly) I scooted her back down with an energy bill.  It took awhile to catch her, and in the meantime, I estimated she caught about 5 crickets and was slowly digesting them into a gooey disgusting ball.

Not my usual feeding protocol, at least it didn't used to be.

This led me to think about how I have been feeding all of my huntsman spiders, and led to today's experiment with Huntsman #2. I have been giving these guys a cricket a day through the top of the container, and often removing the uneaten cricket the next day from the bottom.  After this incident, today I took the bottom off of the other Huntsman's container, took the moist cotton out that I use as a pseudo substrate, and put about 15 crickets in there instead.  Sure enough, Huntsman #2, "Nicey", descended after a few minutes and started gobbling until she also had massive gob of grossness in her mouth.  I think I have been doing this all wrong, but now I know how these guys need to eat!

My huntsman containers, Costco food containers with the top cut out and plexiglass velcroed on.