Hello everyone!
I'm new on these forums, so I guess I'll start with a short intro.
I'm currently a graduate student in a lab that works with spiders, of course I love these crawlers, that's why I'm here .
Anyway, we have a bunch of black widows in cages sitting around, and they've been doing just fine. We're in California here so we get tons of them. We've moved some of our work to Nephila clavipes, the popular orb weaver, and we're getting a little bit of a problem setting up their home.
As Nephila clavipes are not native to California, we get our weavers from Florida. I'll get to the point.
So before my time here, the previous graduate student bought these giant mesh cages for the Nephila. He wasn't able to keep them alive for too long, so I took over the survival project. I figured it was a humidity problem, so I glued sheets of acrylic to the sides of the mesh cage, so now I have two giant sealed cages, with hinged doors. I also purchased the ZooMed Repifogger and controller to keep them nice and humid, with the mister going through a hole i cut in the top of the cage.
So overall it seems like they are doing well, we've actually gotten 4 egg sacs so far (one this morning!).
Here is problem #1:
I try feeding them flying fruit flies. (The lab across from us does fly work, so just borrowed some to culture). The problem is though, the flies really like to escape from the cracks on the hinge door.
I've also tried feeding them meal worms, but the ones who don't establish good webs are hard to feed.
So I tried fixing problem #1, and I run into Problem #2:
I tried a) temporarily taping the door cracks with masking tape, to keep the flies from coming out; and b) I glued strips of rubber on the sides of the doors to keep it shut tight.
However.
One of the cages started condensing on the side... Only one of the cages.
Both are set to 70% humidity, and are set right next to each other next to the window.
I tried looking up why it would condense, and it seems like it is a problem of lack of ventilation? It doesn't make sense as one cage is fine while the other is fogging up.
The condensing cage also gets these bursts of high RH, shooting up to 95% for some reason.
I'm going to try switching the humidity controllers around, and see if it's a hardware issue.
I thought you people might know better than I do on what to do here.
Thanks!
PS. Sorry for the wall of text x_X.
TL;DR:
1) Cage leaks flies, what do I do?
2) Cage is condensing up on the sides, what do I do?
3) Hello everyone!
I'm new on these forums, so I guess I'll start with a short intro.
I'm currently a graduate student in a lab that works with spiders, of course I love these crawlers, that's why I'm here .
Anyway, we have a bunch of black widows in cages sitting around, and they've been doing just fine. We're in California here so we get tons of them. We've moved some of our work to Nephila clavipes, the popular orb weaver, and we're getting a little bit of a problem setting up their home.
As Nephila clavipes are not native to California, we get our weavers from Florida. I'll get to the point.
So before my time here, the previous graduate student bought these giant mesh cages for the Nephila. He wasn't able to keep them alive for too long, so I took over the survival project. I figured it was a humidity problem, so I glued sheets of acrylic to the sides of the mesh cage, so now I have two giant sealed cages, with hinged doors. I also purchased the ZooMed Repifogger and controller to keep them nice and humid, with the mister going through a hole i cut in the top of the cage.
So overall it seems like they are doing well, we've actually gotten 4 egg sacs so far (one this morning!).
Here is problem #1:
I try feeding them flying fruit flies. (The lab across from us does fly work, so just borrowed some to culture). The problem is though, the flies really like to escape from the cracks on the hinge door.
I've also tried feeding them meal worms, but the ones who don't establish good webs are hard to feed.
So I tried fixing problem #1, and I run into Problem #2:
I tried a) temporarily taping the door cracks with masking tape, to keep the flies from coming out; and b) I glued strips of rubber on the sides of the doors to keep it shut tight.
However.
One of the cages started condensing on the side... Only one of the cages.
Both are set to 70% humidity, and are set right next to each other next to the window.
I tried looking up why it would condense, and it seems like it is a problem of lack of ventilation? It doesn't make sense as one cage is fine while the other is fogging up.
The condensing cage also gets these bursts of high RH, shooting up to 95% for some reason.
I'm going to try switching the humidity controllers around, and see if it's a hardware issue.
I thought you people might know better than I do on what to do here.
Thanks!
PS. Sorry for the wall of text x_X.
TL;DR:
1) Cage leaks flies, what do I do?
2) Cage is condensing up on the sides, what do I do?
3) Hello everyone!