New to invert keeping, have Latrodectus sp (geometricus I think)

Tsathoggua

Arachnopeon
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
23
Ok, so I have myself such a cute new pet, although how it became such is an odd story.

Picture me walking in my underwear downstairs in the middle of the night, half asleep, looking for a midnight snack, only what do I find instead? a spider scurrying across my lounge floor.

It was enough to snap me awake in a heartbeat, as whilst I am not at all experienced keeping inverts as pets, I am pretty knowledgeable as far as natural history, and biology goes, and I recognised the general spindly legs, small pea-shaped high angled body morphology pretty damn quickly.

Looked like a widow spider to me, which is odd, since in the UK we aren't meant to have any, escapees aside, or are there any Latrodectus sp. breeding here now? I am in the NW of england, for informations sake.

Only small, not quite a spiderling, but still, young, banded pattern on the top of the abdomen, same shape as the aposematic coloration of a vespid wasp but darker yellowy brown, cannot see hourglass marking on the underside, but I quite possibly wouldn't be able to see it on L.mactans at this age.

(not to mention distance vision in my good eye is fine, but close up is mediocre, whereas anything but moderately close up with my other eye, thanks to getting a facefull of boiling hot corrosive chemicals in it some years ago, isn't too good but extreme closeup is completely crap)

Cannot see the red marking typical of Latrodectus, does L.geometricus always posess it? possibly will do as the spider ages, hopefully it will put on weight soon, starting it on a diet of small crickets, which she has fed on once since she was caught a few days ago, put one in there, and wham! my lil girl took it out in a heartbeat, wrapped it up in silk and sucked it dry like a milkshake:clap:

At the time, I had her(I think) in a drinking glass, with a patch of wet moss in the bottom, some twigs strung round the glass for her to build a web on, now I just finished setting up a nesting jar, from a glass jam jar with wooden coffee stirring sticks broken up and superglued around the inside surface, with pieces glued to each other, to act as a spider-sized climbing frame almost, and provide a surface for web building, and to hunt from.

Also the moss is still there, I can add more if needs be, it is there to absorb water so the spider does not dehydrate, now it is on top of a shallow but uniform sprinkling of the wood-shavings my housemate has for her new pet mice.

So, can anybody point out anything I may be doing wrong?

How much water is nescessary to apply to the moss, per day?

One other question, something odd happened, I put some crickets I got given by my local pet shop for free into a cleaned coffee jar for storage, as I had read to do, with a quartered small tomato to feed from, minutes after this, all but 3-4 were dead.

In the jar, turn my head, then dead, like they had been dropped into liquid HCN, I was able to 'rescue' a couple, most almost dead, the tomato was grown by myself, albeit accidentally from leavings hitting the garden and taking root, so I can confirm no insecticides were used.

Are tomatos known to be toxic to crickets? being a member of the nightshade family, Solanacea, it wouldn't surprise me if there were alkaloids in there which are potentially dangerous to insect life if harmless to us, I know there is an alkaloid, tomatine in there, but I don't know its action, probably a muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist knowing the majority of nightshades, or maybe a nicotinic agonist/antagonist, who knows, not I, yet.


So, any ideas, advice, or glaring oh crap you screwed it up big time errors in my care method?
 

SpiderShadowz

Arachnopeon
Joined
Sep 25, 2010
Messages
23
I am new with the crickets myself but they seem to like bran cereal. I have a little shell with a small amount of water I leave for them also. But not too much or they might drown. I was told they like fish food also, but I have had the most success with the bran.
 

Tsathoggua

Arachnopeon
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
23
It is just odd, what happened.

One minute I put them in a clean jar, with a quartered cherry tomato, the next, 90% of the crickets were dead, happened as fast as a house fly exposed to a nerve agent, and that is damn quick.

(No I didn't go deliberatelyy poisoning the flies, they seemed to be attracted to something that was left out to crystallise, tried feeding, and died right away)

How much and how often should an enclosure have its water source topped up?

Also, I am told that too large an enclosure will cause a spider to essentially not become adjusted and settle down, and eventually die.

However this information came from a petshop owner who has given suspect or outright wrong information in the past.
 
Top