- Joined
- May 7, 2005
- Messages
- 729
Hi,
no secret diet needed, just some knowledge that´s open available (nutrition quality of fruit flies for example) and some observations and ideas (toxin potency and resulting possibilities).
Butantan needs bigger amounts of spiders to work with than your casual spider keeper and breeder, that´s all. Take an offspring amount of 1000 slings for an example: if Butantan expects to raise all 1000 or even 900 of them to adulthood, i´m not surprised if they will say it´s "impossible". Simple basics of evolution-biology will already explain why this isn´t going to work. If you take your casual breeder who´s just interested in maintaining a breeding-stock we´re talking about numbers of some 50 specimen max. That´s two completely different stories here...
TRETZEL did practic work with Phoneutria and wrote a very interesting (and to my experience correct) article about keeping, breeding and raising large numbers of Phoneutria in captivity. He did his work in Butantan in the 1950´s and had apparently not too big problems in success.
While his methods may seem a bit strange at first sight, i can personally confirm that they work. The key is simple: simplification.
I don´t draw conclusions, as i just don´t have enough data to do it. What i am doing is telling out of my personal experience, sorry, if you had other experiences in the past. I´m for sure not specially skilled or something, as there are many keepers around here in europe that can confirm my own experiences through their spiders.
Just to mention: i have kept three slings of P. nigriventer back in 1999 and lost all three of them. Was it their fault? To my opinion: No, it was mine. As time goes by, experience and knowledge increases and makes it sometimes necessary to reconsider certain opinions and even "knowledge".
Contest? I´m not out for any kind of contest.
I´m just here to compare experiences and try to gain some more knowledge. In my understanding, you´re repeating the same again and again: had a sac, all slings dead, spiders are just impossible to raise.
Once again: sorry for that. I once had the same results, now i´m having different.
Why some slings just die? If you fed indeed fruit flies, there might be one indicator. A much more interesting point to my opinion is just afforementioned evolution biology: with offspring amounts in the high hundreds or even thousands, there are always many specimen within that will just not make it. It might be possible to raise them, with enough efforts, but one has to keep in mind, that nature has its own ideas about that and problems are to be expected.
Needless to say, that there are losses with next to every species, i really have troubles with understanding why this gets so stressed with Phoneutria? Raising some Ancylometes spec.´s can be a real pain in the rear-end. Cupiennius getazi was since long believed too be very, very hard to raise (and is another species where i have completely different experiences...), strangewise there are some people around that breed and raise them since years...
Lycosa species from south-america can be very frustrating to raise, too. Not to mention the quite new available african ctenids: boy, are those small.
Furthermore: who has ever tried to raise some tropical Pisaurids? Me not, but i heard some quite "interesting" (if not frustrating) reports of attempts this year, unfortunately futile ones.
Take Scytodes for a last example: they were once said to be major hard, if not impossible, to raise,too. In fact it´s quite simple, one just has to break with "public knowledge" and give this special spiders what they demand, they will live and thrive.
If you expect a Phoneutria to be exactly that simple to raise as perhaps Cupiennius salei, you´re gonna be frustated, other spiders, other demands. Does this mean they are "impossible to raise"? Hell, no!
They have just some other needs.
Greetings,
Stefan