# Venting steam: Phoneutria keyserlingi



## Stefan2209 (Sep 29, 2007)

Hi there,

don´t mind: i´m just venting some steam.

I´m actually just in the process of mating my Phoneutria keyserlingi´s. Might sound like a lucky thing to many of you, however, i DEFINITELY have another opinion about this:

Many people round the planet seem to enjoy reading updates about this genus.
Some people even never seem to get tired about running their noses bloody against my door with asking "can i buy this or that Phoneutria, preferably one of the most toxic species, please, and subadult / adult of course".
THIS, even i have since years stated i´m NOT a dealer.

Where are all those people THAT interested in the genus when it comes to breeding???

By now, there are two, maybe still three (??), breeders at all in Europe who are breeding "the genus" which means multiple species.
Nevertheless, even I receive a steady amount of "wanna buy" mails.

There are two other groups of people that bug me even more off:

1. People sitting on "breeding" material of rather rare species, like adult P. keyserlingi males. This persons don´t want to breed, nevertheless those are neither willing to part with their specimen, nor are they willing to attempt breeding by themselves.
They just let their breeders die by pure intent for no apparent reason.

2. People who are apparently not to the slightest degree knowing what they are doing but got somewhere hold of breeding material.
Next is for those persons to just go out asking "tell me everything about how to breed these" and if one does, they´ll just reply "hell, there´s no way i´ll do that, this is dangerous".
(Well, of course it is! What have you thought about keeping and BREEDING one of the most toxic and aggressive species on this planet?)
Finally they suck with the breeding attempt, get at least one specimen killed and are not ashamed to just knock at ones door again, this time inquiring "well, i somehow lost my male, surely you´ll sell me one, won´t you".

What´s coming out of all this mess is simply this and exactly this is what gets me raging, while my very own stems are doing fine:

THE SPECIES ARE DYING, right in front of your eyes. In all keepers enclosures.

What do you think where those spiders have come from? Doesn´t play a role, ha? They´re here anyway, so who cares...

By now, exactly two persons for Europe.

If my very own breeding will fail and that of that second breeder, that´s gonna be it, friends.

Well, not too dramatic, one might say, let´s just go out and get some new from the bushes.

Sure, most def with P. keyserlingi which is coming from Brazil. The guys over there would just be too happy to invite some people to come into their neck in the woods to just "steal" some spiders, especially given the Brazilian legal situation.
And: por que?

For some other people being able to keep them to death like it already has happened here several times?
To be able to just "execute" specimens in plain dumb breeding attempts because people just want to polish their egos through such, indeed having a real interest in the spider itself?

Even more annoying: steady inquiries from no-names who never ever seen any Phoneutria spp. in real life but want to get hold of ONLY P. FERA.
Not, because they can tell you in serious terms, WHY it has just to be THIS species, just because that guys have somewhere read that P. fera has a bad rep, so THIS is, OF COURSE, the species to go for for such people.

Really, really ennoying. We´re still talking about living beings here, folks. They belong and originate somewhere from and they are fragile. Care has to be taken to keep them alive and comfortable.
Efforts have to be taken to make them grow and even more efforts to make them reproduce.

What are YOU doing?

Think about this. 

Greetings,

Stefan


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## moose35 (Sep 29, 2007)

do you have any p. nigerventer adults for sale?   hehe i'm only kidding.
i totally understand you. and what your trying to get across but having people who just keep and aren't interested in breeding is just part of the hobby.


                 moose


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## Aru (Sep 29, 2007)

Hi Stefan,
I have the same opinion like you. 
Last and this year there were I think thousands of phoneutria slings,who were for sale in Europe. I think in the first weeks 50-60% of this slings pass away because of the natural death rate. In the next months 10-20% more of this slings died on account of wrong keeping. So in the end in the worst case 20% rise up to adults. 
And some keepers maybe only had the luck to rise up one Phoneutria sling. And that was a male. So they thought that it so hard work to growing up this sling that they don't sell this male.They tried to find a female for him. And when they had no luck this males died without to perform the think,they lived for...
So I could explain myself why no new breeders are on the market,who sell Phoneutria slings...

Greets
Daniel


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## Stefan2209 (Sep 30, 2007)

Hi,

looking good...

Actually my female is snacking on what´s left of the male.  

Inserted the male yesterday afternoon. Mating behaviour started with dusk, with the male getting pretty active and with much drumming and "investigating" from his side.

Have to admit i got quite bored of this after some time so i didn´t stay up the whole night watching (guess they know anyway what they´re doing, so no need for "supervision")  

The female had, of course, been well fed in advance. Now, after consuming her mate, she´s just extremely fat. Time to hopefully produce a nice fat and fertilized sac...  

Fingers crossed!

Greetings,

Stefan


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## Stefan2209 (Sep 30, 2007)

Aru said:


> And some keepers maybe only had the luck to rise up one Phoneutria sling. And that was a male. So they thought that it so hard work to growing up this sling that they don't sell this male.They tried to find a female for him. And when they had no luck this males died without to perform the think,they lived for...
> So I could explain myself why no new breeders are on the market,who sell Phoneutria slings...
> 
> Greets
> Daniel


Hi,

this is just half the way down:

I had an "all-in-all" mortality with either P. keyserlingi and P. nigriventer of 50%, speaking about raising fresh hatched slings to adulthood.

Even with the estimated mortality toll in your account of 80% that´d mean that there´d still have to be some several hundred specimens available and this would just be based on the mass that i alone have produced here and would not include the offsprings produced by other breeders.

Speaking about not giving away males because it´d be the only specimen one has:

This is what i refer to as "being interested in the genus":

It´s NOT keeping one single specimen to death, it´s about CARING for the genus / species in general captive care in Europe.
I speak out of personal experience here, as i gave away my one and only male P. boliviensis for free. Why keep him?
I had no females to mate him with and the specimen was just completely useless to me.

Why charge money for that guy? Everything that counts is that the species as such is given the chance to stay alive in European enclosures wether it´s here with me or at some other keepers is secondary, as long as the receiving person has enough experience and knowledge to have a realistic chance to be successful with reproduction.

Greetings,

Stefan

Reactions: Like 1


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## Aru (Sep 30, 2007)

Hi Stefan,
I do know what you mean.
80 % death rate is the worst case I think. And like I told you yesterday and you said even with 80% death rate there are several hundret slings that growed up to adults. Where are the breeders of this??? I don't know!
I can not explain myself why no other keeper without you and 2 other guys still breed Phoneutria in Europe! 

Maybe many keepers have one or two Phoneutria in there collection. This two specimens live in their tank and live there to the end of their life! 
The reason? It is to dangerous for this keepers to catch a adult Phoneutria female or male and bring to the male/female. They are frightened of their own spiders. 

They prefer to buy a little sling of a Phoneutria and set them in a tank,that is big enough to keep the sling to the end of his life in this tank...and from time to time they open the tank a little bit to feed the Phoneutria or to give water.

Greets
Daniel


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## SouthernStyle (Sep 30, 2007)

All I can Say to that Is you've got an GREAT point....But It goes unread by many people, and most wont listen either....


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## chaim (Oct 6, 2007)

Hi Stefan,
well, what to say... ist a sad situation.
Finally I have a P. boliviensis female and I want to breed with her.
But I have no idee about here age and there for no idee if she has reached sexual maturity.

I bought her from Grabowitz (I know...) but she is a jong female and looked healthy... he asked 50 euro for her, so I did.
He clams that she is wc, if true, that would make it if more interresting for breeding.

Then the biggest problem... getting her a male.

But, first things first, I have to know much more on mating, breeding and raising slings frist.
Ill go throuw you post's and see what I can find furthermore on the www.
any info from any one to help me out is ever so welcom!!!


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## Stefan2209 (Oct 8, 2007)

SouthernStyle said:


> All I can Say to that Is you've got an GREAT point....But It goes unread by many people, and most wont listen either....


Hi,

ah, i´m quite ok with this.

Now I´ve made my point clear i guess and can just point "those people" to this thread.

As i mentioned, "want to buy" inquiries are not that rare, especially from that "want to keep to death - but don´t to breed" sort of people.  

Greetings,

Stefan


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## Stefan2209 (Oct 8, 2007)

chaim said:


> Finally I have a P. boliviensis female and I want to breed with her.
> But I have no idee about here age and there for no idee if she has reached sexual maturity.
> 
> Then the biggest problem... getting her a male.
> ...


Hi Chaim,

there are actually two Phoneutria species which may be in risk of exctinction in European captive care. You just mentioned species No. 2.

By the pics i saw of your female, i´d guess she´s adult.

Your other question about her age doesn´t play a role in "this kind of game": you have no real options - so i wouldn´t waste a second with a thought about that. Sometimes you can just work with what you have, regardless if it´s optimal or not.

Finding a male specimen will be a more difficult task, though. I´m not aware of one single specimen, however, i heart some rumours about scattered adult specimen of both sexes still being around here and there.

You won´t find detailed reports about mating and raising as there are none existing so far that i´d be aware of.
I could write one about personal experience but decided against it until more data is available here, which will still take much more time.

Mating should be no prob, though, i mated one female myself and can just say: easy.
Like usual for Phoneutria, mating can take several hours or even more than one day, but P. boliviensis proofed to be quite tolerant against each other, so i see no troubles here.
Same goes for sac construction and incubation - no serious problems experienced. To be honest: no problems experienced at all.

In contrast to P. nigriventer P. boliviensis sacs hatch already after some 4 weeks, like many other Ctenidae do, too.

Raising of slings however is another topic, i had a complete loss of all stems to "strange" reasons: the slings didn´t accept any prey, accepted then some, grew some, though extremely slow, problems continued, some day everything was just plain dead.

Not a too nice experience, however, i´m not willing to pipe into that old "impossible to raise" horn again but take it just for a species where more detailed experiments have to be done.
I could have bought more specimen by now but decided against it due to the mass of offspring of other species i have actually here.

At least i know by now how to get hold of this species so i´m not as concerned as with some others.

Gonna keep my eyes peeled. If i should come across a male i´ll drop you a line. Just over the last weekend i had a talk with one of the big importeurs in Germany who mentioned he saw subadult / adult specimen for sale very recently.

We´ll see. At least P. boliviensis is very "straight forward" in regards of keeping and reproduction, so it´s quite comparable to P. reidyi by these attributes.

With P. keyserlingi and P. nigriventer this is different. Anyway, my mated P. keyserlingi female started to behave "strange" some days ago...
Once again: we´ll see...

In about 10 days i´ll get some more specimen of this species and of both sexes, so i´ll be able to just mate at least one more female.

Greetings,

Stefan


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## chaim (Oct 8, 2007)

Thanks for the info Stefan!!!
Am happy with that!
Am going to start my search for a male this week.
First I have to make my girl a new enclosure.
What would be te best thing for decorating it for breeding, where do they make the eggsac, ore dow they carry it around?
Ive read something about it, but the book itself is full of mistake's. (just a book about keeping exotic pets that mentioned some about Phoneutria)


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## Stefan2209 (Dec 9, 2007)

Hi,

not the best pic, but i guess you get the idea...   







Thumbs pressed....

Greetings,

Stefan


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## chaim (Dec 9, 2007)

That's a sight for shore eyes!!!

Good luck with it.


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## Stefan2209 (Dec 30, 2007)

Hi,

you all haven´t forgot about these, have you... ;P 

Just some randoms of one of my precious babies :drool: 

*Phoneutria keyserlingi*, cb juvenile male




































See you 2008...

Greetings,

Stefan


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## arachnophoria (Jan 13, 2008)

I am with you on the whole deal of people getting ego boost from keeping venomous animals.I really am shallow...if it doesn't fit some niche in my collection in its physical appearence,then I don't want it.I don't care if it's rare,venomous,spins golden silk,or can tap dance to show tunes...I either have to have some fascination in its habits or its appearence appeals to me.That being said,I do like the look of many venomous animals and plan to add some toxic scorpions to my collection,but it is only after considering the risk,my experience level,and the habits of the creature is question.I am also opinionated on the matter of proper set-ups...if you can't provide the proper conditions,then you have no business owning said creature.I also intend to breed nearly every species I own,though I will maintain a few tarantulas just for thier presence in my collection,but I to have parted with rare or desireable stock to see it go to breeders,that have more time or a more experienced interest in working with the species.Bravo for you for doing something unique and being passionate about it.I wish to work with this genus and a few other true spiders some day soon,but for now,I am growing my tarantula collection.


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