communal P regalis setup

[Malhavoc's]

Originally posted by Reigningblood
I don't get where I don't have "back up."

This is a moral point of view and I explained my reasoning for disagreeing with everyone else.

I said that we as captures have a responsibility to give these spiders (captives) the longest, nicest possible life they can have. We should in no way end their lives prematurely, even for the sake of experimentation because I feel these are pets and not lab rats.

I mean as in you dont have much expierince on here and as you have never had a communal tank you dont have expierence there.. agh forget it. just stop the aruging your point is valid and should be understood and added to the collective results of this I do not believe that Immortal put them to a early death on purpose she probably believed she could pull it off without casualities but everyone even her has a understanding they are to be ecxpected. and after a good long time in a successful tank the new one was disaster so I think her tries were a sucess it was the rehousing that failed

 

[Code Monkey]

Originally posted by Reigningblood
I don't get where I don't have "back up."

This is a moral point of view and I explained my reasoning for disagreeing with everyone else.

I said that we as captures have a responsibility to give these spiders (captives) the longest, nicest possible life they can have. We should in no way end their lives prematurely, even for the sake of experimentation because I feel these are pets and not lab rats.

Moral p.o.vs are one thing, I've got them, KG's got them, we've all got them. The difference is when you start applying your moral view to other's actions.

For instance, I recently got a bit of backlash similar to the one you're getting because I took the position that newbies shouldn't be cavalierly buying tons of tarantulas when there's very little chance that they will stick with the hobby longterm and a number of people said, "So what, they can sell them when they get bored."

I disagree with that attitude because I do see these pets as a responsibility. I'll discuss that p.o.v with anyone who wants it, but I do not go around lobbing it at every person who talks about buying their 20th tarantula even though they just got their first 6 months ago - I just think it
You didn't bring this up as a hypothetical discussion over the issue, you said matter of factly that Holley's actions were stupid and bad; and Holley, in case you missed it, is well liked around here and not subject to having someone come in here and start judging her actions when they have no point of reference.

And see, even though I take the attitude that these guys are a deeper responsibility than some people think, I still see nothing wrong with what Holley did because my moral p.o.v. does not see anything wrong with allowing tarantulas to be tarantulas taking the relative situation into account. So, while I would be the first person to be all over some twit who wants to put his B. smithi in with his P. murinus to see what happens, I'm not about to condemn genuinely experienced keepers doing this with Pokies or any other species for which they had a genuine interest in "experimenting".

As for some of your other statements, they are misinformed and not a matter of opinion but I'll just leave them alone for now as others have already been all over them.

 

[PapaSmurf]

i think Immortal sin's tank is neat even if some of the T's are gonna die, at one point when i can afford the loss im gonna try a pinktoe cage of like 3-4 common pinktoes around 3" in size. thanks for all the info about your cage Immortal! and sorry to hear about the losses.

josh

 

[abstract]

Well put Code. No further comment.

 

[Reigningblood]

Originally posted by Code Monkey
As for some of your other statements, they are misinformed and not a matter of opinion but I'll just leave them alone for now as others have already been all over them.

I challenge you to find them also.

Where am I misinformed?

This was all suppose to be dropped and you guys keep poking at me with a stick, so keep it up.

 

[Code Monkey]

Originally posted by Reigningblood
This was all suppose to be dropped and you guys keep poking at me with a stick, so keep it up.

If you're going to keep on squeaking, then, sure, people will keep on poking.

Where am I misinformed?

As for demonstrating where you're misinformed within this thread, I offer the following as a demonstration:

• She failed to setup a situation that represents there native habitat

  No, she abstracted the conditions, just like every other behavioral project in existence, ever. You cannot replicate wild behavior in the lab exactly because you cannot replicate the wild in the lab - you choose the factors you want to emulate and you skip the rest. In terms of what can be done, she did a fine job - multiple harborages and adequate food and water and she even removed the issue of higher level predators.
  

• Point being that no spiders had to die at all.

  You've never even explained this statement and it was misinformed. I posted the other day about the mortality within my collection over the past 2 years -> you wind up with about a 20% or greater loss when starting with small slings, no communal setup required. Statistically, starting with 10 sac mates, she was going to have had losses by now no matter what - so, sorry, some spiders were going to die in spite of what you said.
  

• You claimed that Holley was a respected, responsible, experienced keeper, if so, had she kept all 8 pokes individually, they would all be here alive today.

  I just showed why your statement on them being alive was misinformed, and you just insulted Holley's knowledge and responsibility to her animals. You may have retracted this under our pressure, but you said it and I'll bet you still think it anyhow.
  

• I thought you said she was experienced! If she had more than a 15% casaulty rate among individually kept for spiders, then she should simply not be in this hobby because that shows negligence on her part.

  Again with the pulling numbers out of your arse about what captive mortality rates are - between old age, sling deaths, etc., I've lost nearly a third of all the tarantulas purchased over the past two years. Some of them were due to negligence because sometimes real life gets in the way of other responsibilities. Still, taking negligence out of the equation, I still would have lost 28% of my collection due to other causes - you have absolutely no point of reference for what the death rates are in captivity with unexpected sling deaths and the diseases which hit our tarantulas so, again, you made misinformed statements.
  

• The 3 pokes that got iced by "natural causes" wouldn't likely die that way in their own natural enviornment.

  No, they'd have likely died some other way long before the "experiment" ever even got started (already said by me, but it fits here). Survival in the wild is probably on the order of something like 5% for small clutch/large sling size species like Poecilotheria (and probably much less than 1% for large clutch/small sling species like Lasiadora).
  

• I never flamed or attacked her, I simply stated that if her reputation was true, had she kept the spiders individually, that the casaulty list wouldn't have been so great. No attacks at all, go back and read my posts.

  I've already quoted an indirect attack and pointed out repeatedly how this "no spiders would have died" bit is nonsense.
  

• I just said if she didn't do this experiment, there would be 5 more pokes in the world today.

  You said the same false BS again that we've discounted again and again.
  

• If you have a 50-66% death rate, then you are clearly negligent, not caring, unable to care for these animals and therefore shouldn't.

  Misinformed to say the least, Lopez covered why this attitude was misinformed and you came back with this piece of brilliance as a retort.

'nuff said.

 

[Vanan]

I do not agree with you but we can agree to disagree.

And I think that there is the essence to coexistence in a community forum such as this.

 

[Immortal_sin]

wow...I go to work for 8 hours, and look what happens!
Again, RB is entitled to his opinion, but he did personally judge me, and that is rather insulting. However, it's much less insulting than if it was someone here that I had seen around for awhile, and had respect for.
Basically, what he says makes sense to him, and that's fine. I completely disagree with most of his statements (and no, I can't be bothered to quote them all either).
RB, once you get a bit more experience and tact, I'd be happy to debate with you...otherwise, you're officially on the ole 'ignore' list.
For the rest of you, I will continue updates as things happen, as the more knowledge and experiences we share, the more information we have about keeping tarantulas in captivity.
I intend to do a write up on this, and possibly submit to the ATS forum, along with my G rosea couple that has been cohabitating continually for a year.
I sincerely hope that my updates don't continue to provoke flaming!

 

[MrDeranged]

@RB - Yes, you're entitled to you opinion and I do understand your point that if she didn't do the "communal" thing, those dead pokies MAY have been alive today. What you need to understand is that even if they weren't kept in a "communal" setup, there is just as high a chance that there would have been the same mortality rate. For the record, Holley is an "experienced hobbyist" contrary to what you may believe.

@Chip - Enough

@Holley - You just keep right on posting your updates. I wish you much better success going forward than what you've had so far... Poop happens as we all know...

Scott

 

[Botar]

Holley,

Thanks for the update. I recently made a road trip to a wholesaler and got to see first hand several multiple sling set-ups. One tank had 50 P. regalis in it and another had 50 A. versicolor. Both were quite remarkable, but I must say fishing a bunch of slings out of an open communal set up was quite the experience for me.

Botar

 

[Phillip]

1st off sorry to hear about the losses.

While I don't do or recommend the communal setup thing due to the higher risk I certainly don't condemn anyone for trying it. It is a risk but then again keeping any species is to a degree.

Something that I strongly dissagree with though is the thought that none would have died if it weren't tried. Simple logic and understanding of nature tells you that animals that have hundreds or thousands of babies do so because all of them don't make it. This isn't always due to predators either. Some babies simply die for no apparant reason and anyone who has kept enough Ts knows this.

Phil

 

[Shellob]

Hi I was just wondering wat youd do if one of them molted and the others attacked it. How could you prevent it happening?

 

[Lopez]

Not a great deal.

 

[Reigningblood]

"You claimed that Holley was a respected, responsible, experienced keeper, if so, had she kept all 8 pokes individually, they would all be here alive today."

You obviously don't get what I am trying to say here.
I agree that she is an experienced keeper based off of Code Monkey's opinions. I said had she housed them all individually, they wouldn't have died because she is an experienced keeper. She could watch over each individual spiders so crickets, cannibalism, molting problems wouldn't have occured so much as to kill 60% of your T's.

This was my whole argument

Experiment = 5 dead pokes.

No experiment, individually kept = less than 5 dead pokes.

What is so hard and mind-boggling to get about this argument? Somehow I am inexperienced and am pulling facts out of my ass.

"Point being that no spiders had to die at all."

Meaning exactly what I stated above, had they not been in a communion, then there wouldn't be so many dead right now.

And to all of you that are like "blah blah, pokes die all of the time in the wild, so this doesn't really matter" - a 60 gallon glass tank is not the wild, your room is not the wild. They are now under your care and their fate depends on it.


So sorry I'm not in your "elite" class of spider keepers, and with crap like this : "RB, once you get a bit more experience and tact, I'd be happy to debate with you...otherwise, you're officially on the ole 'ignore' list." I really wish I did insult you. You don't know how much experience I have, nor did you even understand what I was trying to explain to you. How in any way shape or form are you better than me? Because I have 6 spiders and you have 100? Because I didn't try a communal setup?

 

[Lostkat]

I've read most of this thread and most of it has really hacked me off to be honest. Hence why I'm not going to get involved (apart from the point below). I strongly suggest that people take time to read posts of others and attempt to be a little more informed before they start jumping in with both feets and throwing around false comments. I'm not directing this at anyone in particular, there just seems to be an awful lot of it going on in this thread as always happens with "communal" threads. Perhaps a communal forum should be set up where members can discuss their projects and share ideas without the 'anti-communal' mob leaping on every thread and completely ruining it.

I happen to think that people who deliberately keep their deep burrowers (such as H. schmidti) in shallow tanks just so they're on display all the time, are extremely cruel, and that it's just a matter of time before their poor stressed out spider either rolls over and dies, or bites them.... but you don't see me leaping onto every thread completely trashing it.

Anyway... enough of that. Just one comment I wanted to make really;

Originally posted by Palespider
My main concern is them having enough room to be alone when they molt. They all like to web off an area where nothing can get to/bother them. I think the best way to insure a successful 'experiment' is to create as little of a stressful enviroment as possible. I know you've been quite successful so far Metallica, this is just my view on it.

I have three 3-4" sub adult female P. formosa in a communal tank. They have many hiding spaces - more than 3 spiders would ever need. However, they all spend 90% of their time sitting together in a hollow tube of cork bark, completely webbed in. It's barely big enough to fit all three of them in there, yet when I opened the tank to check on them the other day, one had moulted in there!! It seems as though this one at least was more than happy to moult within a couple of centimetres of its sisters. Something I found quite amazing and wasn't expecting. I too would have thought they'd need to retreat to their own space to moult... it seems as though this was not the case. Fascinating stuff

 

[Code Monkey]

Originally posted by Reigningblood
Experiment = 5 dead pokes.
No experiment, individually kept = less than 5 dead pokes.

What is so hard and mind-boggling to get about this argument? Somehow I am inexperienced and am pulling facts out of my ass.

---

"Point being that no spiders had to die at all."
Meaning exactly what I stated above, had they not been in a communion, then there wouldn't be so many dead right now.

I'm not going to keep posting on these subjects other than to say that you're trying to now pretend you took a much different approach to your arguments all along. Of course, even taking the new improved version of your counterpoint, you still clearly don't understand that nothing guarantees the results you think would have come from not doing the communal setup, nor does anyone know for sure that the communal setup directly resulted in any premature deaths.

So sorry I'm not in your "elite" class of spider keepers, and with crap like this : "RB, once you get a bit more experience and tact, I'd be happy to debate with you...otherwise, you're officially on the ole 'ignore' list." I really wish I did insult you. You don't know how much experience I have, nor did you even understand what I was trying to explain to you. How in any way shape or form are you better than me? Because I have 6 spiders and you have 100? Because I didn't try a communal setup?

See, this is why this has continued on far longer than it should. We understand your point just fine, we just don't care - half of it is derived from a poor understanding of factors governing wild and captive scenarios, the other half from a hardcore pro-life stance that we just plain disagree with. That you seem to think we should see things from your p.o.v. is exactly why you're on her ignore list. More than one person supporting her in this trial has said they have no intentions of trying something like this themselves, if nothing else it's expensive and many of us don't think it's worth losing spiders *ourselves* to achieve something like this, so doing communal setups has nothing to do with whether or not we disagree with you. We disagree with you because you've taken a fair enough opinion, "I think the increased risks to the individual spiders in a multi-housing setup isn't worth it for me," and advanced three steps too far to, "It's wrong to do this because spiders will die and anyone who does it is irresponsible".

What makes the tarantula so special that it has to be protected from every aspect of the perils of the world? I mean, my B. dubia were taken from the wild originally, should I be condemned because I routinely try "communal living" with them and my tarantulas and they just keep getting eaten, or my zoophoba larvae, or my termites? I just keep trying the same experiments over and over again and they keep getting munched by the tarantulas. Maybe it's the tarantulas that are at fault, maybe I should get rid of them...

Ultimately, they are just non-sentient, non-aware inverts that possess no emotional capacity. We have a responsibility to treat them well but that does not mean that they are not here for the purposes that the keeper decides within reason. There is no higher moral value to my female N. coloratovillosus than one of the countless B. dubia that I've tossed into her maw to feed her. Both her and the roaches were treated well and never tortured and abused but each had their purpose in my collection and each fulfilled it. Some people choose to design multi housing setups with them because that is the reasonable purpose to which they want to put these creatures. Sure, it increases the risks for mortality, so what?

So, unless you can come up with a better argument against this than your hand wringing emotional plea about obligations to protect captive bred invertebrates (and simultaneously come up with the sub-proof that explains why it's ok to feed out equally intelligent animals by the dozens to them) I really don't care to hear more of this.

 

[Reigningblood]

Well see, if you actually followed my posts and read them and didn't spend 95% of your time trying to think of a witty response, then you would have gotten the whole point I was trying to make. How in the hell did I just change sides when I have clearly been saying the same things over and over again?

"Point being no spiders had to die at all"

That was my main argument, buddy, so don't go on acting like I just switched arguments on you all of a sudden.


Its funny how someone like you can clearly and easily accept tarantulas being killed and experimented on, but you then can't accept people who buy 20 tarantulas, keep them for a year, then sell them.

 

[Code Monkey]

Originally posted by Reigningblood
"Point being no spiders had to die at all"

That was my main argument, buddy, so don't go on acting like I just switched arguments on you all of a sudden.

Are you really just this stubborn? That argument is fallacious, it has no basis in anything approaching reality for the hobby, and yet you still continue to make it and you still fail to back it up with anything approaching facts or, at the very least, consistent reasoning.

You've also made plenty of other points so, yes, you're backpedalling and not very gracefully.

Its funny how someone like you can clearly and easily accept tarantulas being killed and experimented on, but you then can't accept people who buy 20 tarantulas, keep them for a year, then sell them.

Well, one, I never said I didn't accept it, that's one of the chief differences between us, I realise that people do what they do for their own reasons. Two, it's not the people that sell them that I take issue with so much as the majority who just let them die in a corner (dying for genuine, permanent neglect *is* a facet or irresponsibility - it's all in the intentions). Three, all I did was offer a bit of advice to newer keepers that maybe they should think about the lifespan of tarantulas and whether they were really in the hobby for the longterm or just a quick dip; done, that was the end of my sermonizing on that subject. Whatever arguing came after was from people who seemed to think that the fact they could be sold at all made all the other issues irrelevant and that people shouldn't worry about putting any thought into getting into the hobby as if keeping tarantulas was like coin collecting.

As for genuine experimentation in general, I have no problems with animal experimentation on tarantulas or otherwise but I'll be the first guy to support sending someone to jail for animal cruelty. There is a difference and you just don't seem to get it.

 

[Aviculariinae]

Okay Ladies hand bags down now,with all the bickering you could have had a dozen caresheets written by now!

 

[xanadu1015]

All I can say to that is...yeeha




Anyway, I'm really sorry about the loss, I'm finding the pokies to be really fascinating, especially since it sounds like my dad wants to get one for my mom.


Food for thought, things such as this can happen in the wild as well...but I'm sure you all already know that.




Laura