Pholcus phalangioides attack..

[Rigelus]

My wife who's quite hooked on mantids and beetles, has a few praying mantids loose in our tropi room. We've also got quite a few Pholcus phalangioides hanging around. Generally these are not a problem as they do a pretty good job of keeping the loose fruit flies we also have down to a sort of acceptable level.
We've often noticed these characters hanging down in the cricket buckets, snapping up suitable sized prey.
However we are gonna have to start culling them pretty soon now. They breed really well in our room and there are literally hundreds of them hanging around in their untidy sagging webs..

The other day i noticed this when i was looking around..

This phalangioides has caught and killed one of the full grown female Miomantis paykulli (4 cm total length) my wife has loose in our tropi room.

It's apparently quite normal for these chaps to kill prey much larger than themselves because of their relatively strong venom, however i reckon it's still a bit of a rare event to get it down on film, especially something like this.


Does anyone know if these Pholcus phalangioides despite their venom, be used as food for scorps and T's..?

 

[pitbulllady]

That's an interesting pic, which really does give lie to the belief that Pholcus phalangiodes(one of my favorite true spiders) is incapable of eating anything larger than dust mites. To answer the question, though, I would not think that there would be enough protein or "meat", so to speak, on one of these spiders to make it worth the effort to catch them as food for T's or scorpions, other than very small specimens. If it's small enough that a Cellar Spider would make a decent meal, it's probably also small enough, at least in the case of a tarantula 'sling, for the Cellar Spider to turn the tables and eat IT. I've seen some monster-sized Wolf Spiders and Kukulcania hibernalis wind up just like this mandis did-as a feast for a P. phalangiodes that was only a tiny fraction of its size, and I have little doubt that even a decent-sized tarantula 'sling would end up the same way.

pitbulllady

 

[PhilR]

I'm certainly aware of escaped tarantula slings becoming Pholcid prey.

 

[dtknow]

Off their webs they are quite helpless though. Perhaps you could remove all the legs and offer one to a large sling.