"Tagging" and tracking Sydney Funnel Webs

[Frogdaddy]

Could you imagine placing little tags on these guys? @RezonantVoid

The Fiddly Business of Tracking Australia's Most Venomous Spider - Atlas Obscura

www-atlasobscura-com.cdn.ampproject.org

 

[Sambro]

Madness! I was watching another Australia YouTuber and he was collecting funnel webs to be milked for venom and the funnel webs were ending up in frog traps!

 

[Edan bandoot]

i saw a video of a guy tagging south american amblys and i thought it was crazy, cant imagine with a spider.

 

[RezonantVoid]

Pretty interesting read, wasn't aware anybody was doing this. Seems like a bit of a waste though IMO, in the wild their MM's are so short lived you'd be constantly going out to retrieve the trackers after a day or 2, and depending where the males are released a fair few would end up in pools where I'm guessing the tags would break. I hope the trackers are pretty durable for their small size.

FW's as a whole are pretty fast growers, I'm surprised to read they reckon it takes up to 7 years for them to mature when captive ones go from sling size to MM's in less than 3 most of the time. Most species I've had males for will eat post maturity for quite a while, unlike Actinopods or Idiopids. Atrax robustus is also not the most venomous, as there's several species that beat them for toxicity and envenomation rates.

The most confusing part I find with the article though, is "not much is known about their life history". They've been in the hobby down here for ages, and are one of the most popular species to begin with as females are currently understood to be far less potent than the males. They construct a heavily web lined burrow with a thick funnel entry, and spend the day hours resting in a chamber at the bottom to conserve energy. As night approaches, they come to the entry and wait until a prey item cross the web, and rush out to capture it, after which they return underground to eat it. They seal off the entry for roughly 6 weeks during molting and it takes about 1 week for their fangs to harden. Not much more to say lol.

1 cool fact about them, there are red colour forms of this species and some other Atracids, mine happened to be one when I got it as a sling and has gone from jet black to neon red

 

[AphonopelmaTX]

Pretty interesting read, wasn't aware anybody was doing this. Seems like a bit of a waste though IMO, in the wild their MM's are so short lived you'd be constantly going out to retrieve the trackers after a day or 2, and depending where the males are released a fair few would end up in pools where I'm guessing the tags would break. I hope the trackers are pretty durable for their small size.

FW's as a whole are pretty fast growers, I'm surprised to read they reckon it takes up to 7 years for them to mature when captive ones go from sling size to MM's in less than 3 most of the time. Most species I've had males for will eat post maturity for quite a while, unlike Actinopods or Idiopids. Atrax robustus is also not the most venomous, as there's several species that beat them for toxicity and envenomation rates.

The most confusing part I find with the article though, is "not much is known about their life history". They've been in the hobby down here for ages, and are one of the most popular species to begin with as females are currently understood to be far less potent than the males. They construct a heavily web lined burrow with a thick funnel entry, and spend the day hours resting in a chamber at the bottom to conserve energy. As night approaches, they come to the entry and wait until a prey item cross the web, and rush out to capture it, after which they return underground to eat it. They seal off the entry for roughly 6 weeks during molting and it takes about 1 week for their fangs to harden. Not much more to say lol.

1 cool fact about them, there are red colour forms of this species and some other Atracids, mine happened to be one when I got it as a sling and has gone from jet black to neon red

When someone involved in an academic study says something like "not much is known about..." they are most likely referring to the lack of similar academic studies published in scholarly journals. The fact pet hobbyists, or those who collect for the pet hobby, know a bit about the life history of a spider from their observations in captivity does not count because it isn't useful to understanding how a spider, in this case Atrax robustus, interacts with their natural environment. The information pet hobbyists might have is also not easily found, scrutinized, or verified since it could be scattered across the internet or held with individuals that can't be found or contacted.

Radio tagging male mygale spiders has been done once, to my knowledge, with Aphonopelma hentzi with some success and the results were published in the Journal of Arachnology. It answered questions such as how far they travel, how long it took them to travel a distance, when they were traveling, and even information that wasn't being looked for such as what was eating them. In the A. hentzi study, the radio tags ended up being found in the stomachs of other animals which gave insight on what was predating on the male tarantulas. Tagging and tracking Atrax robustus could, hypothetically, confirm or deny the statement "males only live for a day or two." Sometimes a good, thought out, academic study is needed to challenge commonly held ideals or assumptions about a popular species of spider.