Congratulations on the baby's
do love an orb weaver. I have a question about keeping them though, I always assumed because they make big webs orb weavers wouldn't be able to be kept in a viv, do they not need huge vivs to make their webs or do they adapt the web to the space they have? I get alot of cross orb weavers in my back yard n have often thought of keeping one but never have because I assumed they would need a viv bigger then I could provide.
If you have any chance at all of them successfully web building they do need a large space.Congratulations on the baby's
I'm making this up as I go along but these critters seem pretty flexible in size requirements. Containers from a pint to a gallon in size are working well for my critters with nice orbs. In the wild I've seen them in small trash bins, silently waiting for their next meal to arrive. The largest orb I've seen by a Gray Cross spider was only about 10" inches in diameter but the anchor points for the radial silk lines were 8 feet apart; no idea how they do that.Congratulations on the baby's
So they don't need as much as I thought n by the sounds of it will adapt to different situations. Maybe next year when the girls come back to my garden I will have to ask one to come stay with me
So cool please keep us updated on what they do !
Apparently they have each other for lunch. Where there were once about 12 critters there are now 3. I had one male, much larger than his sac-mates, but he just up and dropped dead. I'm baffled, doing fine and then a few hours later...gone. I thought he might have been "playing dead" but after a few days he was still hanging in the same place and then dropped to the bottom of the enclosure. The only thing out of the ordinary is that his pedipalps were big, really big, much larger than I would expect for such a little guy (~3mm body length). And shiny, looked like little balloons. More research is needed, obviously, but I'm working on it. In the meantime there are three egg sacs that I'm waiting to hatch so, who knows?
Sounds like he was a mature male that's usually what the male parts look like big boxing gloves on the end of the padipalps. Plus this sp of spider don't live long a year for males and maybe 2 years for a female if your lucky.
the ones you have left thrive for you.
This guy was less than two months old, still trying to figure this out. Not having a lot of luck with the males of this species, they don't seem as robust as the females but you can say that about a lot of critters.Sounds like he was a mature male that's usually what the male parts look like big boxing gloves on the end of the padipalps. Plus this sp of spider don't live long a year for males and maybe 2 years for a female if your lucky.