A ridiculously easy spider to keep, and a pleasure - Meet Steve

Steve is a European House Spider, Tegenaria gigantean, the kind that people often find in their sinks or bathtubs.  Contrary to the rumors, these spiders do not crawl up the drain, they fall into the sink or tub while looking for water, and they can't climb back out because they can't climb slippery surfaces.  Steve was almost microscopic in size when I received him.  He came in a pill bottle with no substrate and a lot of webbing. I have kept him with no substrate because I have since seen his brethren in their "natural" setting, usually a shed or a garage, where they live well off the ground in a whole lot of webbing. It's my anniversary with Steve, I got him a year ago and in the time I have had him he has molted 8 times, initially molting every 2 weeks, then slowly down to monthly plus, molting for probably the last time in September, at about 9 months of age.

Steve in all his beauty

Personality-wise, Steve is very scared. If I so much as look in his direction he retreats. Unlike my Carolina Wolf Spider, Hogna carolinensis, who would put up with being stroked by a paint brush for awhile before turning to attack it, Steve retreats if I touch him and has never turned to strike.

He builds vast sheet webs with a funnel escape in one corner.  His webbing is incredibly strong, when I open the container it pulls away with an audible rip. Every day or so I spritz a little water onto his web for him to drink.  I have never seen him actually drink it.

A distant cousin of Steve's, in a slightly more natural setting.

He is a ferocious hunter, though not always immediately. It seems to take him awhile to sense that there is prey in the vicinity.

He is also a prolific pooper! I have moved him numerous times to get him away from his masses of faecal material on the floor of his various homes.

Happy Anniversary Steve!

Steve's bare bones home

Time between molting for different arachnids

Almost since I began keeping arachnids I have been keeping a log of feeding, molting and rehousing of all of my arachnids. Mostly because I have the memory of a mouse, and if I don't keep track I will have no idea who is due for what, and they would all probably starve.  I have noticed, not surprisingly, that as animals get older, the time between molts grows longer.  I thought I would look a little more closely at this to see if I could figure out how to predict the next molt for an individual. Well I haven't gotten that far yet, but I did find an interesting pattern.

In the following graph the green lines represent my four Amblypygi (Tailess whip scorpions), the black lines represent three different species of tarantula, and the red line represents a single true spider, my Tegenaria gigantean (giant European house spider).  Please note, the Y-axis is a bit arbitrary.  Day 1 was simply the first day I started the log (and I got the animals at different points in the log), and the first molt wasn't necessarily the first molt ever for the animal, they may have molted before I got them. The best fit for these lines would not be a straight line, obviously, but just for interest sake I treated them as straight lines and calculated the slope.  The Amblypygi have a slope of between 103 and 185, the tarantulas between 40 and 68, and the true spider at 29.  This means that the number of days between molts for the Amblypygi goes up much more steeply as they age then either the tarantulas or the true spider. I was a bit surprised by the difference between the Amblypygi and the tarantulas, because I thought the slope might be related to the longevity of the animal, but Amblypygi and tarantulas are similarly long lived, and and least some species of tarantulas live longer.  However, Amblypygi molt their entire lives, albeit very seldom as adults.

What is the application of this?  Nothing much that I can think of . . . for now. It would be useful to be able to predict when an animal is due to molt. Usually their behavior gives it away, not feeding, hiding, etc. But sometimes we miss these subtle cues, and a cricket loose with a molting animal can be disastrous. Knowing a range of when an animal is likely to molt could make me more careful about feeding.  Also it's just kind of interesting. Another question I would really like to answer is will stress cause them to delay molting?

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.