To pull a sac or not?

[Pyst]

My A.seemanni dropped a sac on the 25th of Dec. She appeared to be taking care of it up until yesterday. She doesn't seem to be caring for it as she had. The sac is located in a bottom back corner and can be viewed through the glass. She usually has it in her mouth or is in very close proximity to it. Yesterday I didn't at any time see it in her mouth and she doesn't seem to be as close to it as she had been.

I've got to work tomorrow and won't be back home for 24 hrs. I don't know whether to go ahead and pull it or wait. It was dropped 29 days ago. Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

-Mike

 

[Varden]

Pull it. At this point, I think you should also be able to see development if you carefully opened it. If it looks viable, then you can put them in a hammock until they molt into 1st instar. Good luck!

 

[Pyst]

Well I went ahead and pulled the sac. As soon as I took it out and noticed the firmness of the eggsac that something had gone wrong. Upon opening it my suspicion was confirmed. The sac was indeed bad. Inside the eggs were visible but several were black and all of them were covered in a gooey substance. To make matters even worse there were mites all in the sac. This I don't understand.

Right before the female dropped the sac I had moved her to a new enclosure with slightly damp new coco coir. She hadn't been fed at all since she was rehoused and I still somehow managed to get mites. I don't know if the mites caused the egg to go south or they ended up there looking for a meal after the egg had gone bad.

Guess I'll be looking for another male sometime in the future. It's kinda weird but I'm not really upset about loosing it. I guess I had prepared myself well enough to know the odds were against me. So I'll keep trying and see what happens. No pity party here. hehe

-Mike

 

[David_F]

Sorry about the eggsac.

To make matters even worse there were mites all in the sac. This I don't understand.

This happened to me with a B. vagans sac last year. I think no matter what you do there are always going to be mite eggs in and on everything, even brand new, right out of the bag substrate. Once the conditions are right and there's food for them, in this case the bad eggs, they move right to it and take over. Really sucks to open a sac and see that.

Better luck next time. Sounds like you did pretty good this time, though. This is a tough species to breed (couldn't even get mine to mate, let alone make a sac) so getting a sac is a step in the right direction.