Welcome to the February 2007 Spider Diary

...and what an exciting edition it is this month ! I am delighted to unveil a new look for the monthly diary, which as you can now see, now has colour backgrounds. Also making a debut this month, full colour video with soundtrack, and titles, and everything ! Good grief, its almost professional :)

Let's plough straight in and have a report on Fluffy, a spider that is usually to be found either securely closetted away in her burrow, or calmly scaling the walls of her enclosure, not in an attempt to escape, but just because that's where she'd like to be. But young spider's grow, and I was checking in on her the other day, and thought that her tank was looking a bit on the small side...

So action was taken, and amazingly I had all the right bits to make her a nice new home, into which I transferred her that very evening. I also did a step by step tank tutorial while I was at it that you can read here , should you be interested...

Or, you could just look at the finished thing here...

Fluffy has never been 'interacted-with' before, and this was consistant with her attitude at first being lightly touched on the back of her hind legs with an artists paintbrush. She jumped on it immediately, a millisecond later realised it wasn't food, and went into a full-on frontal threat posture at ME, bless her :) So I backed away, waited for her to calm down (only 30 secs or so), and then tried again. This time she seemed to realise that the paintbrush meant her no harm, and calmly went where it was suggesting. I lined up the 2 tanks, and gently coaxed her from one to the other, and no further spider-excitement ensued... well done, Fluffy !

Here's a photo of her in her new tank, looking relaxed and wonderful...

 And now we move on to another exciting debut for the spider diaries...

Using a slightly better camera, indoor lighting, a bit of imagination, and some editing time I am pleased to bring you some video that is perhaps a cut above my standard fare... Yes indeed, not only is it NOT night vision, and therefore COLOUR, but its is also LONG, so we get to see more than just a micro-clip, and there's even sound and titles.

Here then is Fluffy, 1 minute after the door to her new home has closed behind her for the first time.

 

One of the only moults to be retrieved from Flash. 5 more will be revealed when she moves tanks !

 

 

This is Legz's 6th instar moult, and the first to display adult warning colours. We can safely assume she is extremely venemous now.  Note the fang top left...

 

 

This is the carapace from the same 6th instar Poecilotheria.

We can see 8 very well positioned eyes. Arboreals like these have reputedly rather better eyesight than their terrestrial cousins.

 

 

Legz gets logarithmically bigger ! notice adult colouration first appears at 6th instar - before that there were no warning colours, and she was a more even overall brown, assumedly so that she blend in better while young.

 

 

And lastly for this bit, we have young Boots, and Tenebrus contributing to small pile of brightly coloured, very early 2nd, 3rd, and 4th instar moults. Neither of these spiders will end up looking like any of these moults as adults. For reasons I am not sure of, these guys start out in life fairly brightly coloured and patterned, and get less so, or differently so, later.

 

 Strangely, even the zingy and vibrantly coloured Boots is STILL a nightmare to find in her tank sometimes, so it just goes to show that the brightest-hued of spiders can still blend in to the right environment fairly seamlessly - how clever...

 

Moving on, here's a shot of Flash, my small avicularia's tank, into which her old tank has been placed, and we are now commencing the XX weeks wait for the spider to notice. Can we see her at all ? Not even slightly.

 

As you can see, she's not in it !

Next up is possibly the most beautiful spider I look after, alive and well, and showing us why keeping spiders is a good idea. Please bask in the reflected glory that is a newly moulted sub-adult Poecilotheria fasicata in full ventral display mode...

 

 

 

Normally we wouldn't see the yellow at all unless she was threatening us... as shown below...

 

 

HOW WELL does this spider blend in with the branch on which she sits ?!!

Awesome camouflage in action. Note how we see no yellow at all when the spider is relaxing the right way up !

 

 

But flash lighting brings out those colours very well when she basking on the cool glass... 

 

Lastly for this month, its another video escapade, again showing Legz doing her thing. This was taken a day before she last moulted, and shows the heady danger involved in the creation of a moulting web outside your main burrow. Even the amazing sticking powers of poecilotheria are challenged when trying to orchestrate such complex webbing, and we can see that she almost falls to the substrate at one point, before recovering herself and carrying on with fresh determination.

 

 

And a day later, she moulted into the beautiful animal we have seen in today's photos... and a 7th instar sub-adult to boot. That's 1 cm to 14 cm in 6 months - impressive hey ! I probably have enough ventrally superb shots of her now to post a photo and ask for a visual sexing - after all, I am only guessing she is female, and actually have no clue. however, now she is big enough to see, so I'll keep you posted when I find out.  

 

And there has been another month in spider-land - I hope you will agree it has been entertaining and informative ! See you next month, when hopefully Flash and Tenebrus might have put in a photo appearance !

 

Take care everyone...

 

 

B, B, G, L, F, F, T, Z and Me...