Care/housing advice for my various non-T Mygalomorphs

[skyeskittlesparrot]

Regarding Atracid webbing, it varies considerably per species and specimen. Most of the VIC and SA species generally create less webbing around the burrows, particularly in the case of Hadronyche meridiana, with a barely webbed open hole sporting 2 or 3 reduced triplines. On the other end of the scale up in QLD, you have Hadronyche infensa

Thank you!
I love the webbing of that infensa. Once I have the enclosures right for all my current spiders I’ll have to keep an eye out for anyone selling any of them or other QLD species.
All my current ones I think are found in NSW (Walkeri, Barrington tops, versuta, macquariensis, and orange). My orange is only a sling but it has a fair bit of webbing. The macquariensis I haven’t had very long and it’s currently in a temporary container but she has a fair bit of webbing as well, I’m thinking out of my current ones she will probably have the most webbing.


^ My little Hadronyche sp. orange


^My Barrington tops when I was feeding last night showing the full enclosure (you can see her in her burrow with her cricket)


^ Walkeri showing the top and also the burrows and spider inside during feeding the other night. It has no visible webbing at all anywhere. The least webbing out of any of my funnel webs.

I am now realising I don’t have any photos or videos of my Versuta or Macquariensis so I’ll have to get photos of them at some point (for the other 3 above the photos are all just screenshots from videos of feeding them).
The Versuta has a few trip lines and has the false entrance/flap to its burrow. Less webbing overall than the sp. orange though.

My orange and Walkeri are similar in size. The Walkeri container is 5x5x7cm for size reference.
Orange is currently in a 12cm tall round container with a diameter of 10cm and you can kinda see above how it’s set up.
Macquariensis is about 1cm in body length but from what I can find it seems that that is adult size for that species and just in a 250ml Tupperware container but I have a 20x20x30cm glass enclosure for her to go into, I just don’t know what substrate to use or how to set it up. I figure hers I may as well do right now so that I hopefully don’t need to ever remove her once she’s in there.
Versuta is overall probably about half the size of the macquariensis but I’d still classify as a sling? And it’s in a 16cm tall round container with a 10cm diameter.
My Barrington tops has a body length of just over 3cm. I measured her body last night before feeding her. And she’s in the 20x20x30cm glass enclosure set up how you see above.
The Macquariensis I purchased as a female but the Barrington tops I didn’t purchase so I couldn’t pick a gender but I’d assume it’s a female?

 

[RezonantVoid]

macquariensis will likely have pretty standard webbing, versuta have always been extremely heavy webbers in my experience. Macq 's are also among the smaller NSW species as noted, body length (I include the abdomen when it comes to BL) is usually no more than 30-35mm.

I had hoped to help with the substrate issue by now but just haven't had the time to sit down and address it in depth. But here's a very brief run down without any explanation; they generally should in soft soil if circumstances permit. There's alot of benefits to this, but I'll address them in detail when I can.

 

[skyeskittlesparrot]

@RezonantVoid I managed to get an ok photo of my tube building arbanitis tonight.


She’s not shy at all, often sits at the entrance of her tube and always a good eater but she attached her tube to the lid of the enclosure which makes it difficult to get good photos or videos of her. The glass inside the enclosure is rather dirty which makes it hard to get clear photos and I can’t really clean it without removing the lid but I’d feel bad unnecessarily removing the lid and damaging her tube.
The lid has a little flap in it which I can drop crickets in through so I at least don’t need to remove the lid to feed her.



When I redo her enclsoure do you have any recommendations on how I should set it up?

Does the type of substrate matter much? She’s just on straight coco right now and dug her burrow the night I got her back in May and built her tube the next night and has seemed happy enough for now (haven’t seen her wandering at all and she has a good appetite). I want to redo her enclosure anyway though to make it look a bit nicer so I may as well switch the substrate to whatever she is likely to enjoy the most. Arbanitis seem to vary a lot in terms of what environments they are found in so I assume the ideal substrate would vary a bit between species?

The enclosure is 30cm tall, how deep should the substrate be to allow for her to also build her tube? Should I try to find something taller to house her in so she can have plenty of substrate depth as well as plenty of tube building space?

Should I provide wood or rocks for her to build her tube against? Or debris for her to potentially incorporate into her tube? Her current tube is free standing and then attached to the lid and for probably the first month was just entirely clean webbing, nothing used to camouflage it or give it support or anything. Now she’s attached a dead leaf and some coco peat to it. The leaf is from a pothos plant which is on the other side of the enclosure and was alive when she removed it from the plant and attached it to her tube. In the photo it’s not very clear but there are springtails on the leaf keeping everything clean so at least I shouldn’t have to worry about the leaf getting mouldy as it decays. (All of my enclosures that have either wood or live plants in them have springtails as well. The springtails seem to do particularly well in this enclosure and the Hadronyche Barrington tops enclosure. Thankfully both spiders seem unbothered by the abundance of springtails).



Just for fun here’s a photo of her from the day she arrived. She was really docile and calm and didn’t seem bothered by being held. A lot of the other spiders when taken out of their shipping containers are either flighty and try to hide or defensive/aggressive but she’s one of the ones that just calmly sat on my hand and then calmly walked around on my hands and didn’t seem to mind being held at all. Getting her to go off my hand and into the enclosure was actually a struggle, she was very reluctant to get off me.


And I say she but I don’t actually know the gender. Identifying mature male spiders seems easy enough but I don’t really understand how to tell if one is a definite female. From the diagrams I’ve seen and descriptions I’ve read I can’t really see any differences between mature females and younger spiders for non-T mygalomorphs