Tenebrus goes AWOL... 

This is not good news. There has been an escape. Yes - despite following all my own and everybody else's advice about watching new spiders in their homes, I didn't watch this one throroughly enough. I had her on webcam - I looked at the screen every 10 minutes, and didn't see any movement in there all night. I even went in to check them all 4 or 5 times during the night, but didn't open the irminia tank thinking she'd want time to be left alone, and setup home. 

But no - I get to her tank this morning to mist her, and no sign anywhere. This is not good. She is most likely to die fairly quickly because she is so small, and so fragile, and the house averages around 65F when she needs closer to 85. If she doesn't die in her first week, or get eaten by the various house spiders that live with me anyway, she may just find enough food to sustain her through a moult or 2 , which MAY allow me to see her, or signs of her presence.

The hunt continues...

23-08-06 - 16:00 update

4 PM - have now been through the spider room completely and thoroughly, and still no sign. The window was open all night, but hopefully she would have shied away from that, and gone for somewhere warm. But she's not on any of the other spider's heat pads, or her own, or any of the ones I've left lying around to tempt her onto, so my hopes are not high of finding her before its too late. I've also checked in all other spiders tanks excpet Legz, the pokie's, who was right next door to her own tank, but hey - if she got in there, she's dead already.

I'll keep looking, and hope she is ttracted to any of the plant pots, dark spaces, and heat mats I've left around for her.

Bizarre as it sounds, I am thinking of releasing 5 or so pinhead crickets into the house, working on the premise that a lost spider with some chance of finding suitable food is better than a dead spider, but I don't really rate this as a feasible plan for success. I am probably having these stupid ideas because I have now been up for 36 hours, and counting... but still the search continues, at the expense of sleep, and pretty much everything else... I'll keep you posted... 

24-08-06 - 01:53 update

Well, I finally HAD to go to sleep, and further searches of the spider room, and indeed the whole house, had got me nowhere.

However, on waking at 1 AM this morning, I was in for a pleasant surprise... guess who was sitting high up on the wall of the spider room ? Yep - there she was, bold as brass, unharmed, and unstressed, and not even looking too cold. She had ignored the heatmats I'd placed around, and indeed the dark places ! And what's more is that assumedly she had been in the room all the time, despite my exhaustive and seemingly thorough searching, suggesting that either the search wasn't anywhere near exhaustive enough, or that it is simply impossible to find a hiding spider, and you have to wait until they are 'out and wandering' before one has the slightest chance of a recapture...

And that, ladies and gentleman, was the first, and hopefully last JW spider escape recovery mission... Of course, I am suitably overjoyed that my little girl came to no harm for her adventure, and I personally have learned bucketloads from the experience... hopefully wiriting it all down like this might help someone else who runs into similar problems...

But for now, thats all little animals back in their nice warm homes, and also the end of this report :) 

JW