How do you/can you even sex a Pholcid?

Milly

Arachnopeon
Joined
Sep 4, 2010
Messages
10
Here's Albert, my happy little daddy long leg, who I posted about a while back. He's grown quite a bit:


(pictured with an ant)

He's a house spider who's situated himself comfortably in my home for the last several months, and I feed him ants and flies. :) He's had two molts so far that I know of and both seem to have gone quite well. Every so often he'll stop eating for awhile, but he seems otherwise healthy, and I've heard this is normal behavior.

However, whenever he does stop eating, I go into spider-mom mode and start worrying about something I heard about - that male adult spiders will stop eating until they mate, and eventually starve to death if they don't mate. I have no idea if he's actually a male or a female.

Is there any way to sex these spiders? I'm not even sure on his exact species, only that he's a member of Pholcidae, but if anyone knows more specifically that'd be great. If it helps for identification, I live in California.
 

The Snark

Dumpster Fire of the Gods
Old Timer
Joined
Aug 8, 2005
Messages
11,046
My unqualified inexpert suggestion. Get some more of them. The females tend to group up into a harem with a single male. The down side is, of course, the males might battle it out for control of the harem.
 
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