Is that your lunch your are eating? Oh GOD NO IT'S YOUR SPOUSE!

I think the whole bit about spiders eating their mates is a little overblown in the media and in popular culture.This article:
http://www.livescience.com/7555-creepy-cannibalism-female-spiders-eat-mates.html
talks about this phenomena and how it usually comes down to size difference.  When the male is a lot smaller, the female is more likely to eat him.  Why? Well she is hungry and he is small and available.

However, my attempt to breed my two Phidippus regius (royal jumping spiders) was not a testament to this idea.  Rogelio and Xiomara (from the t.v. show Jane the Virgin) were purchased as a nearly mature couple of captive bred spiders from TarantulaCanada.com. I was advised that the may or may not molt one more time, and to place their enclosures side by side.  After their last molt, and when they start to show a lot of interest in each other, they may be ready to breed.

I watched a lot of videos of jumping spiders breeding, so I would know what to expect. I researched as much as I could about how to do this.  I thought I was ready, and I cautiously put them together, having just fed them both a mealworm, and closely monitored them. They seemed to mostly be ignoring each other. Then my four year old son needed a drink, or a sandwich or something: my attention was lost for just a moment and . . .

If it seems like there are too many legs in this picture it's because there are.

I don't know if Rogelio saw it coming, I sure didn't.  The astonishing thing was, they were nearly the same size. And she ate every bit of him. There wasn't so much of a scrap of exoskeleton left. It took her a very long time and afterwards she was very sluggish and her abdomen was ridiculously large for about a week. And then she molted.  Boy did I get that all very very wrong.

And poor Xiomara, she missed what was very likely her only chance to produce offspring. She did however get the biggest meal of her life. Hope he was tasty.

More on Tapinoma sessile - combining colonies

Having learned a bit more about Tapinoma sessile, I decided I would try and combine together my two small colonies.  Apparently colonies with multiple queens are quite common, and colonies do not show animosity to each other when they meet.  I thought it was worth a try and the combined colony might be a lot more vigorous. I joined the two test tubes to a common outworld and waited, hoping they wouldn't murder each other. It took about 18 hours for them to interact.  Unfortunately I missed seeing the first contact, which occurred sometime in the middle of the night.  This morning though, there is brood moving.  I no longer have any idea which ants are from which colony, but there doesn't seem to be any animosity at all.  The brood is being moved out of the smaller colony's tube and into the larger colony's tube.  There is a bit of squabbling going on, I watched some workers trying to move a larvae and other workers trying to put her back. But no actual fighting to the point of injury.  The queen of the smaller colony seems calm, though there is no sign of her going anywhere.  If this is successful I am going to try to add a queen with no workers and only brood, who is a year younger.  Hopefully that will increase the longevity of the colony, soon to be super-colony!

A few hours later . . . all the brood has been moved into the larger colonies territory.  Everything is peaceful in that tube.  In the smaller colonies tube, things are a little rougher.  There are a few workers clearly harassing others, I assume ones from the smaller colony are the harassed, maybe the ones that are reluctant to move.  It's starting to look a little violent.  The queen seems to exempt from this so far, and is just chilling at the far end cuddled up to the cotton.

Connecting the two colonies to a single outworld (a small deli container)

The next day. . . the tube from the smaller colony still has the original queen in it, and she is constantly surrounded by 5 or 6 workers that seem to be endlessly harassing her, I assume trying to get her to move out, which she seems very uninterested in doing.  I might have to help this process along, because now she has no brood and the workers aren't particularly caring for her.  I hope this ends well, so far no bloodshed, but I am not sure it will stay that way!

The next next day. . . it all ended badly I am sorry to say.  I joined the two tubes directly together, because the queen from the smaller colony really was in a bad spot either way, all her brood gone, and her workers fled, and the new workers apparently just harassing her to move. But when she did move, and found herself in the tube of the larger colony, the other queen started fighting with her, and then the workers followed suit.  She tried to retreat back to her own tube, and I tried to intervene, but it was two late.  The workers that followed her essentially started ripping her limb from limb, and I rescued her to euthanize her in the freezer, and a few workers with her that I couldn't get out of the tube. A sad day, I feel quite responsible for this disaster. Perhaps they can combine colonies in the great outdoors, but maybe not in the confines of a test tube, or perhaps the circumstances need to be very specific and only queens that are originally nest mates can combine. Who knows, but I won't repeat this experiment!

Tapinoma sessile ant keeping

Tapinoma sessile ants are very common throughout North America, and from the bits of information I have discovered about them, which isn't very much, they often have multiple queens. I have two small colonies of these guys from two summers ago, plus a lot of queens with brood from this last summer, yet to hatch. The queens are about the same size as the Formica limata queens I have previously found, but the workers are tiny, and all the same size. They are actually super cute, but I need a magnifier to see pretty much anything they are doing.  The queen is so much bigger than the workers, they really don't look like they could possibly be related.

Tapinoma sessile queen, workers and brood

One of the issues I have gathered from little bits of info on the ant keeper's forums is that of feeding them protein. While they seem to take liquids, especially sugary liquids quite readily, they apparently aren't keen on much else.  I have had success with with freezing mealworms and then cutting off their heads and dropping them in. They seem to enjoy the fatty material oozing out of the mealworm. So far these guys have been easy to keep. Both of my two year old colonies are still in test tube setups, the larger one has about 20 workers and 30 brood, and the other is much smaller with only 4 worker, and maybe 10 brood. Most of these queens seem to lay a lot of eggs in their first batch.

Two tiny workers and a mealworm lunch

It is my understanding that the queens don't live that long, but queens going off on a nuptial flight may return to their home colony after mating, and so the colony can continue on in this fashion endlessly, though that doesn't work quite so well for keeping these guys in captivity. I may try to join up some of last summers queens and brood with my two colonies, in the hopes of keeping them going longer. These guys are really active, especially later in the day and into the evening, but often during the day all the workers stand very still, almost in a formation, for hours on end, seemingly in a trance.

These colonies are also said to move easily to new nests, and I have found it is easier to move these guys out of a dry or moldy test tube than most of the other colonies I have had.

All in all I find these guys a pleasure to keep and observe.

Avicularia purpurea molt - iridescence on the exoskeleton

I had to look up iridescence, to figure out how to spell it, and I hadn't really thought about the definition, but here it is, via wikipedia:

Iridescence (also known as goniochromism) is the phenomenon of certain surfaces that appear to gradually change colour as the angle of view or the angle of illumination changes. Examples of iridescence include soap bubbles, butterfly wings and sea shells, as well as certain minerals.

Apparently another example is the footpads of Avicularia species tarantulas.

I am really grooving on taking shots of post-molt exoskeletons. After all, you have all the time in the world to set up the shot. And I got some nice shots of the iridescence that I have been noticing in certain lights on their foot pads. And I also got a nice shot of those needle-sharp fangs. This molt had being hanging around for quite awhile at the bottom of Arabella's silk home. She seemed to be increasingly bothered by it, avoiding that end of the home, occasionally going down and pushing on it a bit. So today I decided that perhaps she would prefer it gone. Usually tarantulas decide themselves when to kick the molt out.  Most of them seem to keep them for at least a few days, not sure why. Maybe just recovering enough to have the energy to do the job.

How to know when a spider wants supper

Avicularia tarantulas are some of the most beautiful tarantulas, in my opinion. They are also notoriously hard to keep as spiderlings, requiring a delicate balance of high humidity and good cross ventilation lest they succumb to mold or molting related problems. I have two that seem to be thriving. Arabella, my Avicularia cf. purpurea, is about a year old now, and the other, Tchaiovsky, Avicularia diversipes, is about 5 months. I keep them in food containers with an opening on the top and the bottom, a crapload of ventilation holes drilled in the sides and moist cotton balls instead of substrate (for now anyway). Every time I feed them I throw out the old cotton balls and put new ones in. I figure this will really decrease the opportunity for mold to develop, and it seems to work really well for these two anyway. I keep them on my desk, not on a shelf, because there is more airflow on my desk than anywhere else in the room. Plus I like watching them while I work.

 One of the things I quite like about these guys, besides their beautiful coloration and calm temperament, as well as the way the walk around lifting their limbs incredibly high in the air, is the way the let me know when they are ready for a meal. They both have a spot that they sit every time they are ready to eat. There really isn't any guess work involved, they basically look like dogs begging for a biscuit. Unfortunately these photos don't do them justice, they both are shimmery and metallic looking in just the right light, but I never seem to be able to capture that light with my camera.

Tchaikovsky

Arabella

And now for something completely different . . . cave digging

This is what cave digging looks like!

Fruit Fly Culture Experiment

I started making my own fruit fly culture right from the very beginning. It didn't occur to me that I could by a powdered product off the shelf until I accidentally came across it one day. I thought my only option for buying it was to buy another culture with flies already in it. Fly cultures are expensive, the only place in my city where I have found them charges $14. And they don't always have the type of fly that I want. There are two that are regularly available, the big ones with wings and the smaller ones without. I find the larger flies more useful for most of the things that I feed, and flies without wings are just a little strange. Anyway, months after I started making my own fly culture I tried the powdered repashy stuff.  I don't particularly like the smell of it, but it seems to work well. But how well? I have wondered all along if it is any better than my homemade stuff (the recipe is not mine originally, it was an internet find). So I decided to do a simple experiment. I made up a bash of Repashy, according to the instructions, and placed 3/4 of a cup in the bottom of a deli cup, and then thawed out a batch of my own mixture and placed 3/4 of a cup of it in the bottom of another deli cup:

I left them sitting for a few hours so the temperature would be the same. Then I took some of calcium powder that people use to increase the vitamin content of feeders and added flies.  This allowed me to subdue the flies long enough to count exactly 20 flies into each culture. Now we wait. My questions are these: is my homemade mixture as mold resistant over the long term, which culture retains moisture better, and which will produce a greater number of flies.  Of course I may not have an ideal mixture of males and females in each cup, which could impact the production numbers.

Update:  Well so far the experiment has been a complete disaster.  I always thought that the calcium supplement powder was no big deal to fruit flies, that they just cleaned it off themselves and went on happily with life, but apparently it's fairly lethal to them. They all died, in both containers, except for two.  So, using the same culture, I am going to throw in a much rougher estimate of 20 or so flies into each one, and try again.  Boo.

Update Number 2: Well again this did not goes as expected at all.  My home-made culture did very poorly, developing a lot of mold and killing off the flies.  This seemed very weird at first, because I use this stuff all the time, and have never had any trouble with mold.  I think what's different this time is the small number of flies that I put in.  I think the flies themselves, and their use of the culture, prevents the mold from growing. The repashy of course, produced the usual amount of flies.  Well, I didn't manage to prove that my home made culture is just as good, which was my intention. Clearly under some circumstances it is not. However, it is what I use most of the time, and it works really well at a fraction of the price, so I will keep using it despite the abysmal outcome of my little experiment.