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Freezing is going to kill mites, but won't do much else. I always bake my wood at 350*F for about 30 minutes before using it for another specimen.

When I kept roaches, I kept Lobsters, Blaberus, and orange-heads. I have not kept B. dubia, so I cannot offer advice for this particular species. However, that being said, I kept them all in 10 gallon glass tanks with a heat lamp on one end of the tank, plenty of egg crates, and I fed them a...

Invertebrate pathologist here. I'd need to do some sequencing to be sure, but that is probably IIV-31, or something closely related. Iridioviruses basically take over all the tissues in an organism. They don't liquefy their hosts like baculoviruses, instead they just kind of take over and hang...

This sounds a lot like a mature male to me. Would you be able to get good pictures of the spider's pedipalps? Those would be the two leg-looking things right next to the mouth.

I didn't catch them. I just picked up the dead ones as I found them. Eventually I stopped finding dead roaches. Unfortunately, I no longer use roaches as feeders. I got out of the hobby to go to school, got distracted with a series of jobs, and left the hobby for about a decade. My current...

Nah, I mentioned cleaning procedures a few times and they were all pretty basic. Boiling tongs after handling dead specimens, discarding substrate, etc. No mentions of things like autoclaving, using boiled water, or anything else I've seen in axenic labs. Regardless, I don't think these...

Lobsters can climb, but need high temperatures to breed. I once dropped a bag of about 500 adults in an apartment I was living in at the time, and stopped seeing living roaches after a few days. So based on that experience, I'm 100% convinced they can't infest. As for the infestation potential...

While I mistakenly used the term sterilization in my first post, I corrected it in my 2nd or 3rd post...somewhere around there. So, no, I've been using the term correctly for a few posts now. Didn't initially, but did correct myself several times before this post. For example: You even...

Nematodes will not spread through the air; they'll spread on infected surfaces and substrate. So long as you haven't put anything from one enclosure into another, you haven't transferred the pathogens. If any of the other animals start showing signs of infection, then isolate them and observe...

Most likely some sort of fungal growth. I'd remove it, just in case.

I mean, what makes a good feeder? I'd argue one which doesn't burrow, one which won't eat the spiders, one which is drawn to the spider's nesting area, can be raised at scale, and one which will not infest your house. B. dubia burrows, crickets can harm moulting spiders (and are a pain in the...

The one change to this methodology is that I would include a series of hides for the spiders because even spiders kept singly will leave an enclosure after awhile if given the chance. Let's say that you have 10 spiders in an enclosure. If they leave the enclosure and all go to the same hide, or...

What kind of water softening system are you using? I doubt that it's additional sodium ions in the water, because I guarantee you that the sodium concentration in their food is much higher than what they'd be getting from the water. Like, several orders of magnitude higher. Unless your water...

Still a strawman, no matter how you slice it. There is a difference between disinfecting and sterilization. The protocol I mentioned earlier does not result in any flora problems. I mean, yes. Fact is, we don't actually know the reasons most animals die in the hobby. Disease is one reason...

I mean, sure. Question it. The issue is that your knowledge is incomplete as well, so we're both questioning each other. I think this kind of discourse is completely healthy. . I mean, we have more knowledge about ebola than we have about tarantula pathogens. I'm just going to reference my...

Reinganum's original work described crickets whose movements become uncoordinated early in the infection, which is what you're describing when talking about your first exposure to the term. I know this because I cited the paper in my MSc dissertation. Later authors have suggested insecticide...

Because we know some things for sure, but we don't know other things. Knowing that spiders have RNAi, but not knowing if DSCAM acts similarly to antibodies doesn't mean we know nothing about arthropod immunity. By definition, having incomplete knowledge isn't a complete unknown. They're...

I'm in a situation where I'm going to have to send out some spiders on breeding loans after awhile, and I've been out of the hobby for awhile. Things have changed, and I was wondering what the accepted practices were for breeding loans? Who pays for shipping of the male? Who pays for shipping...

I think you bring up an important point about confirmation bias, which is why I was asking to see if any actual research had been done. When I respond to breeding threads about how many individuals folks need to get a desired sex, I usually assume a 50/50 ratio which is what I'm beginning to...

We don't know anything about spider pathogens. If we knew more, I'm sure there would be use cases. If they didn't need acquired immunity, they wouldn't have RNAi. There is some evidence of an acquired immune system, but we don't really understand how it works. It doesn't appear to be as...