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.