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!