Cursed wretched cursed big lady escapee

[Vys]

So I've been away from my dear T's for perhaps one and a half week now, which I have been previously this summer too (without mishaps).

I return today to find my Potato's (~8 inch L.Parahybana lady) enclosure's sliding glass door slightly open, and web all the way down the drawers to the floor. Some web on the floor here and there too.
Which is just great, since I live in a dorm (technically it isn't, but we are around 20 students in two corridors sharing two kitchens anyway).
Now, my paranoid inner eye sees her prying the bathroom-door open, climbing two metres up a tile-covered wall, into the vent(through which there lightly blows air), through pipes and into some allergic girl's room. Though this would have to include pushing the bathroom-door half closed again after she had passed through it, as well as not caring about the slight stream of air coming through the vent. Without webbing the slightest trace.

I've looked frikkin' everywhere, (20square metres all in all, including bathroom I don't think she's been into), and I just can't find her. Where COULD she have gone??

There is one last possibility. I found strands of webbing leading to a crack in non-mobile wardrobe just where the baseboard I think it's called is. She might have slunk behind the wardrobe this way, which is why I've placed a bowl of water right outside it, and some dirt around it(so that I can possibly see if she's touched the water).

Any help? Possibly? Any?

Edit: I don't think telling people in the corridor would be a grand idea, somehow. There's always someone that would freak out, instead of just keep a look-out. An all-out evacuation might cost me

 

[Vys]

Door wass locked, windows closed. I imagine the gods bestowed her with teleporting powers just to vex me . ..

 

[vulpina]

Keep looking it will turn up sooner or later, hopefully healthy!! Good luck!!!

Andy

 

[deifiler]

Yeah keep looking... Have a good root around the wardrobe you think she is behind, and instead of soil put down flour or somethign that will provide you with better 'spider prints'... in the meantime I advise the following:

Write on the enclosure "Deep burrower" to explain where the spider is if anyone gets nosey.

Secondly, deny all!

 

[Steve Nunn]

Try 3" wide strips of sand every couple of meters, this should turn her up (keep an eye out for prints). Not a chance of her entering an air vent, too much wind for a T, she'd hate it too much to enter.

Cheers,
Steve

 

[arachnopunks]

I had found my escaped T. blondi in a small opening next to a colapsable dog crate about 2 meters away from his enclosure. The dog crate was leaning against a wall and created a dead space where he took up temporary residence. You might try holding a flashlight so it shines across the floor to see anymore traces of webbing. I would definitely look in and around that wardrobe.

 

[Vys]

Thank you for your tips, I have currently baited the area just outside the hole between the wardrobe and the wall with a bowl containing a living roach, and a bowl of water, both standing on flour.

If nothing appears to have happened tomorrow when I wake up, I will do the sand-strings thing, but with flour (hard to come by sand here).

Good to know she would hate the vent at least! Paranoid eye die!

If I find her before there's some nightmarish accident, (like her having teleported outside my room and given one of my corridor-mates a heart-attack), I will buy her a new tank, an aquarium this time!

Edit: Arachnopunks: I did just that before I turned the room upside down, and I only found traces of webbing in one part of the room, right where she and my avic have been when they've escaped previously (Iknow, I know, lock those tanks), and a strand leading to just outside the gap behind the wardrobe. If there were webbings anywhere else, I didn't find them.

 

[Joy]

A trick that sometimes works is to place a crumpled, slightly dampened towel on the floor near her possible hide-out. Check every morning. Also make novena to St. Anthony Good luck, I hope you find her safe and sound and ASAP!

Joy

 

[Vys]

Anthony Anthony, arest thou jesting me?

So I wake up and find flour in both my glasses of water. One one, there's fingerprints too... I wonder if I got up in the middle of the night, took the glasses, shook them, and sprinkled them with flour?

I've just searched through my room in truly paranoid fashion, so now I think it's a safe bet to say, if she's not behind that wardrobe, she's a teleporter. Damnit, I need an electrical saw.

Edit: Oh, and to clarify, the 3 adjectives in the topic refer not to Potato, but rather my wretched luck. It's not her fault I can't keep her in an escape-safe tank....now though, well, I think she's beginning to deserve 'wretched', at the very least

 

[Vys]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm........ I don't remember the waterbowl I put outside the wardrobe-hole being webbed She lives!!!

 

[Nixy]

Yay!
Move the bowl back a little at a time maybe?
So she has to venture a bit futeher to get to it?
Read and book, sit guard... block her escape...?

Good luck and glad she's alive.

 

[Telson]

enclosure style?

I'm always curious when I hear about people who've had prison breaks... I guess I'm either really lucky or I'm using a completely different style of enclosure than most people. Got a pic of the case you keep her in?

I've used a variety of enclosures actually, and in over 15 years never had one escape. I even modified a dresser drawer with a glass cover and lined it with plastic once to keep a rosea when I was a kid and my parrents were still paranoid about my odd taste in pets and refused to allow one in the huose... It worked great until one day when my mother tried to do some of my laundry and found that was no longer my "sock drawer".

 

[Nixy]

I had an escape Telson.
Totaly my fault.
Nothing to do with the enclosier being unfit.
Simple dumbassery.
I was feeding the legguns and had gotten to the B. emilias. Zevo, our male.
I opened his lid. Started fishing crickets out of the contaner I keep them in and dropped one.
Like a dolt. I drops to my knees and started chasing cricket.....

Needless to say, when I stood with the cricket, triumphant in it's recapture. Bracy went walkabout......

Zevo was gone for two days.

He was found in the worse place. Walking across my teenage daughter's foot. The one person in the house that thinks the spiders are creepier then hell. And where I figured he would turn up...... That or in her bed....

Zevo didn't come to any harm, is alive and well still and that day was rescued by one of my five year old twins.
Twins that are the reason we Have T's and who the T's actualy belong too.

Good luck with the track record.
I hope ya just didn't jinx it by talking out loud about it! LOL.

Murphy is listening!

 

[Godzilla2000]

Please don't be mad but I find the mere thought that you can't find an 8 inch spider pretty hilarious. I mean wouldn't a spider of that size be pretty obvious somehow?

 

[Vys]

Nixy: Haha, they do find their appropriate moments, these T's

Godzilla: I now know where she is

Telson: Originally both enclosure's fault and mine, but since this is actually the second time she escapes, this time it was my stupid fault. Just because she hasn't escaped in a while doesn't mean she won't in the future

See, the enclosure I'm no longer keeping her in is in fact a terrarium, with sliding glass doors in the middle of one side.
These seem quite heavy to slide (for someone like Potato) but apparantly, they're not

 

[Telson]

Ah...

That gives me an idea on the design I have in mind for making a similar enclosure to what you describe for a group of A. avic I'm planning to amass... I think I'll include drop latches on the sliding door to either side that fall in to place automaticly to the outside of the case when the door closes. That way if I wind up using it for a larger species down the road there is no way I can forget to lock it.

As for leaving a case open and stepping off for a moment for one reason or another, well, I've always had others in the house who were freaked out by my little buddies and therefore have an automatic habit of closing the case before doing anything that would allow them to slip out while I'm not watching. Being as I don't handle my T's unless I'm moving them to a temp enclosure for some reason, the only time the cases get opened is for feeding, so there is very little opportunity for escapes.

 

[Nixy]

Telson I was Never in the habit of turning and leaving a case, tank, whatever one uses. Open and unattended. It was habit to close it for every little thing. Still is actualy. But there come days when the mind might be on other things a bit more then one realizes. Or hell, a person just has a moment of pure " doh ".
But they do happen.
Part of what makes people, people. I know that I'll have another escape. It will be my fault for something I overlooked, or turning my back that one breathe to long. I can Hope it won't. I can work toward the goal of it not happening. But I know I will never be so perfect that it won't happen again. Maybe tomarrow. Maybe fifteen years from now.

Godzilla. Haven't you ever lost something you would never ever think you could lose? Like your carkeys in your hand on a stressful day? That so important note that was Right where you left it? It wasn't until I lost one and searched and searched and searched, starting I know just moments after the escape. Did I realize how quick they can hide, how many places in the averge room that they Can hide that or how easly they can be overlooked in a search.

 

[Telson]

Nixy:

I didn't mean to accuse or offend if that's how you took it. I probably should have worded that better...

I was just meaning that if I drop a cricket or such I always close the T's enclosure before going after it. If a housemate came ambling by and saw my eyes anywhere else but on the T and the lid open, they'd go ballistic is all I was meaning to say.

My roomy is always reminding me when ever I get a new T that if he ever sees one running free and I'm not in the house to recapture it, it's going to be a smear on the carpet. Of course I always tell him that if he squashes one of my non-aggro NW T's HE"LL be a smear on the carpet, lol! I've made sure he knows which ones he can just put a shoe box over until I come home and which ones have a significant attitude with a bite to back it up. :}

Anyhow, I wasn't meaning to say anything negative and I appologize if it came across that way.

 

[Godzilla2000]

Originally posted by Nixy
Godzilla. Haven't you ever lost something you would never ever think you could lose? Like your carkeys in your hand on a stressful day? That so important note that was Right where you left it? It wasn't until I lost one and searched and searched and searched, starting I know just moments after the escape. Did I realize how quick they can hide, how many places in the averge room that they Can hide that or how easly they can be overlooked in a search.

I've lost my sanity on numerous occasions.