So, I'm pretty new to keeping tarantulas. I'm thinking this might be a phase, but I tend to spend the majority of my free time compulsively reading about tarantulas and looking at pictures of them on the internet. Another problem I have is that things that are weird to most people don't seem weird to me anymore, and I accidentally talk about tarantulas with people who aren't interested in hearing about them. Anyway, I was sitting here looking at fearnottarantulas, wondering if my wife would accept that it's reasonable to spend $350 on a spider if it's rare, big, purple, etc.
That's when I heard this whooshing/scraping/thumping sound, which is the sound of little arthropod feet scurrying around on acrylic. This was about 2 hours ago. I got up to look at my bookshelf that has all my creatures on it, and I see none other than my H. Maculata up against the plastic with a roach in his mouth! I think the sound I heard was him tackling it. I'm delighted because I haven't seen spider since I purchased him about a month ago. I don't know his sex, but I wanted to name him Saruman the White and now I regard him as a male. When I bought him, the guy at the reptile expo warned me that this species is difficult to rehouse and has "pet hole" tendencies. The tarantula did, in fact, go under my couch and then climb up the wall behind it. I successfully captured him in a cup and put him in his home, but I was not able to keep the incident a secret from my wife. When it happened, I yelled at my kids to go upstairs, and somehow they knew that the spider escaped and told her. They usually don't do something the first time I ask them to, but in this instance they complied without asking any questions.
I watched him chew on the roach for a while, and then he started pacing around his box. He's walking in circles, pausing for about 5 seconds on each wall with a strangely consistent rhythm. Hopefully there's not something bothering him about his enclosure. I thought he might be thirsty, so I squirted some water into his water bowl with a syringe. I got a needle tip for the syringe so I could fill the bowls without opening the enclosure by putting the needle through a ventilation hole and dribbling water into the bottle cap. I don't think he noticed me. For me, the whole invertebrate thing started about 6 months ago with dubia roaches. My wife thought it would be fun to buy a bearded dragon, and he eats about 20 dubia nymphs a day. This adds up, so I bought several hundred larger ones and put them into a rubbermaid tub. They eat carrots and powdered roach food. You may have heard some things about cockroach reproduction, but dubias take a long time to mature and have a long gestation period. I am still buying feeder roaches every week. Anyway, I was really excited about having a cockroach farm, and one day the fact struck me that so many of the most interesting pets eat roaches. This led me to tarantulas.
After watching Saruman patrol his tower for a while, I started looking into the other plastic containers. I saw a Monocentropus Balfouri picking up wads of dirt from the corner and carrying them to his bottle cap. The bottle cap is the only thing in there that isn't covered with webs. 2 other M. Balfouri also happened to be out of their holes, sitting still on top of the webby substrate. I have 6 of these and their names are Ross, Chandler, Phoebe, Joey, Monica, and Rachel. They don't all live together, but 3 of them are roommates and 3 of them have their own place. I haven't decided which name goes with which spider, but there are six of them and I want to use those six names.
The guy who sells me dubia roaches also has Madagascar hissing cockroaches, but he mainly sells those as pets. I started using Madagascar nymphs as feeders for the spiders, because the dubias go straight down into the dirt and disappear. The Madagascar nymphs are pretty slow and sedentary, but they are capable of climbing smooth plastic. The spiders seem to notice them and catch them better than the dubias. I still use a dubia if there is a good opportunity to drop it right next to the hole while the spider is sticking his feet out. I have read that it's a bad practice to leave uneaten food in the spider's enclosure, but I don't expect the roaches to harm the spider while it's molting. Once they find a comfortable spot, they never move again. I'm sure that a lot of them are getting eaten by spiders when I'm not looking, otherwise there would be a dozen of them in each container. I have a ceramic heating element that screws into a light socket, which I am using to warm up my Madagascar breeders. It's about 2 feet from the spider enclosures, and I don't think it raises their temperature above the high 70's (room is usually 74f). The roach box is only a few inches away and it only gets to the mid 80s in there. It's on a timer, so it turns off at night. The room has been getting below 70 at night, which might not be optimal for the roaches, but seems ok for the spiders. Enough of the heat is radiating to the spider enclosures to make the rogue feeder roaches come to the warm side and press their bellies against the plastic, and this makes it easier to remove them. Sometimes I choose to leave them in there anyway, hoping that the spider will remove them. There's nothing for them to eat in the spider's enclosure, but they live for weeks anyway.
While I was standing in front of the bookshelf, my feet started hurting and I realized I had been standing there watching my spiders for well over an hour. I decided to get a bunch of them so that I could at least see one of them on any given day, but the only one I can count on is Avicularia Avicularia, which my daughter named Princess Peach. I also have an emperor scorpion. I know it's alive, because if I drop a roach in front of his hide, a pair of claws will make it disappear. Besides that, I haven't seen him. My son wanted a desert hairy scorpion, but the guy warned us that they are mean and talked my wife and I into taking a (more expensive) emperor scorpion instead. I started to point out that the H. Maculata makes a desert hairy scorpion look like Mr. Rogers, but I figured I would only worsen my chances of leaving the show with the H. Maculata. I took him and the P. Imperator and counted my blessings. I still have a lot to learn about tarantulas, but I have already figured out that my wife doesn't like hearing phrases like "so fast you can't see it move" and "medically significant venom."
That's when I heard this whooshing/scraping/thumping sound, which is the sound of little arthropod feet scurrying around on acrylic. This was about 2 hours ago. I got up to look at my bookshelf that has all my creatures on it, and I see none other than my H. Maculata up against the plastic with a roach in his mouth! I think the sound I heard was him tackling it. I'm delighted because I haven't seen spider since I purchased him about a month ago. I don't know his sex, but I wanted to name him Saruman the White and now I regard him as a male. When I bought him, the guy at the reptile expo warned me that this species is difficult to rehouse and has "pet hole" tendencies. The tarantula did, in fact, go under my couch and then climb up the wall behind it. I successfully captured him in a cup and put him in his home, but I was not able to keep the incident a secret from my wife. When it happened, I yelled at my kids to go upstairs, and somehow they knew that the spider escaped and told her. They usually don't do something the first time I ask them to, but in this instance they complied without asking any questions.
I watched him chew on the roach for a while, and then he started pacing around his box. He's walking in circles, pausing for about 5 seconds on each wall with a strangely consistent rhythm. Hopefully there's not something bothering him about his enclosure. I thought he might be thirsty, so I squirted some water into his water bowl with a syringe. I got a needle tip for the syringe so I could fill the bowls without opening the enclosure by putting the needle through a ventilation hole and dribbling water into the bottle cap. I don't think he noticed me. For me, the whole invertebrate thing started about 6 months ago with dubia roaches. My wife thought it would be fun to buy a bearded dragon, and he eats about 20 dubia nymphs a day. This adds up, so I bought several hundred larger ones and put them into a rubbermaid tub. They eat carrots and powdered roach food. You may have heard some things about cockroach reproduction, but dubias take a long time to mature and have a long gestation period. I am still buying feeder roaches every week. Anyway, I was really excited about having a cockroach farm, and one day the fact struck me that so many of the most interesting pets eat roaches. This led me to tarantulas.
After watching Saruman patrol his tower for a while, I started looking into the other plastic containers. I saw a Monocentropus Balfouri picking up wads of dirt from the corner and carrying them to his bottle cap. The bottle cap is the only thing in there that isn't covered with webs. 2 other M. Balfouri also happened to be out of their holes, sitting still on top of the webby substrate. I have 6 of these and their names are Ross, Chandler, Phoebe, Joey, Monica, and Rachel. They don't all live together, but 3 of them are roommates and 3 of them have their own place. I haven't decided which name goes with which spider, but there are six of them and I want to use those six names.
The guy who sells me dubia roaches also has Madagascar hissing cockroaches, but he mainly sells those as pets. I started using Madagascar nymphs as feeders for the spiders, because the dubias go straight down into the dirt and disappear. The Madagascar nymphs are pretty slow and sedentary, but they are capable of climbing smooth plastic. The spiders seem to notice them and catch them better than the dubias. I still use a dubia if there is a good opportunity to drop it right next to the hole while the spider is sticking his feet out. I have read that it's a bad practice to leave uneaten food in the spider's enclosure, but I don't expect the roaches to harm the spider while it's molting. Once they find a comfortable spot, they never move again. I'm sure that a lot of them are getting eaten by spiders when I'm not looking, otherwise there would be a dozen of them in each container. I have a ceramic heating element that screws into a light socket, which I am using to warm up my Madagascar breeders. It's about 2 feet from the spider enclosures, and I don't think it raises their temperature above the high 70's (room is usually 74f). The roach box is only a few inches away and it only gets to the mid 80s in there. It's on a timer, so it turns off at night. The room has been getting below 70 at night, which might not be optimal for the roaches, but seems ok for the spiders. Enough of the heat is radiating to the spider enclosures to make the rogue feeder roaches come to the warm side and press their bellies against the plastic, and this makes it easier to remove them. Sometimes I choose to leave them in there anyway, hoping that the spider will remove them. There's nothing for them to eat in the spider's enclosure, but they live for weeks anyway.
While I was standing in front of the bookshelf, my feet started hurting and I realized I had been standing there watching my spiders for well over an hour. I decided to get a bunch of them so that I could at least see one of them on any given day, but the only one I can count on is Avicularia Avicularia, which my daughter named Princess Peach. I also have an emperor scorpion. I know it's alive, because if I drop a roach in front of his hide, a pair of claws will make it disappear. Besides that, I haven't seen him. My son wanted a desert hairy scorpion, but the guy warned us that they are mean and talked my wife and I into taking a (more expensive) emperor scorpion instead. I started to point out that the H. Maculata makes a desert hairy scorpion look like Mr. Rogers, but I figured I would only worsen my chances of leaving the show with the H. Maculata. I took him and the P. Imperator and counted my blessings. I still have a lot to learn about tarantulas, but I have already figured out that my wife doesn't like hearing phrases like "so fast you can't see it move" and "medically significant venom."
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better to wake up earlier to spy on the ts rather than to keep on staying up late to watch them(the wife will get annoyed with that sooner or later)
and butt slapping 
your T’s you’ve reached a pentacle of weirdness. I sometimes wonder if I belong on a sports team.