Today in the Spider Room?

[krbshappy71]

Yikes, that had to be a scare to see it laying there in the water dish. Maybe it was having a spa day. Uneventful here, we have everyone moved into their new critter room, I really like them having their own room so I can control the temps without affecting anyone else in the house. We had perfect weather the past couple of days so I opened their windows for the breeze and only closed them at night when the temps started to drop. The only thing I need to work on is the cam, it's too far across the room so once you start zooming in everything gets all fat and pixel-dot-like. Some day I want a cam for every tank, wishful thinking!

 

[Marika]

It happened again I replaced the waterdish with a smaller one, I hope it helps.

 

[draconisj4]

It happened again I replaced the waterdish with a smaller one, I hope it helps.

How odd, I had almost the same thing happen with my A. chalcodes juvenile. I saw her fall off the side into her water dish and she had quite the struggle trying to get out. She did manage to before I had to intervene but I immediately replaced the dish with a smaller and less deep one.

 

[ghostly]

A. seemanni female has been in premolt since the dark ages and I'm here yelling at her to freaking get it over with.
And two of my arboreal slings are getting rehoused into their proper sling enclosures tomorrow and I'm really looking forward for them to settle into their new homes (and for me to take some pics).

 

[Marika]

How odd, I had almost the same thing happen with my A. chalcodes juvenile. I saw her fall off the side into her water dish and she had quite the struggle trying to get out. She did manage to before I had to intervene but I immediately replaced the dish with a smaller and less deep one.

That's interesting. Maybe it's a weird chalcodes thing, lol.

 

[Tortuga]

This started happening a few weeks ago. My P audax appears to be hunting my GBB sling lol

 

[Thekla]

Maybe it was having a spa day.

I bet that was it. Sounds a bit like what my H. chilensis did back in the day...

I still don't know what he was thinking, but as soon as I opened the enclosure to rescue him from his apparent predicament, he rolled over and calmly exited his bathtub.

 

[Urzeitmensch]

My LP has refused food last week so I suspected she was in premolt. Two nights ago I dreamed that she molted. The day after I wanted to feed her. She had molted, probably over night.

I was a little creeped out.

But she is a beauty:


I don't know where she got the superworm she is just eating, though. She must have stored it in her hide. Hope her fangs are already hardened enough ...

 

[baconwrappedpikachu]

I was running low on dubias last week so I got like 50 crickets, threw them in a tub with some food, closed the lid, and forgot about them until last night. I stopped feeding crickets FOREVER ago, so I knew it would be gross, but my mind had forgotten just how horrible those things smell.

I put the lid back on after not even a full second and I actually had to leave the room.

So today in the spider room... I've got to face the foulest smells known to humankind and clean out that cricket tub. I'd rather give my OBT a kiss.

 

[Uial]

My G. pulchripes came out of her hide for the first time in 8 months. And after feeding her I could finally put in a bit more substate because she was my first T the setup wasn't ideal. While I'm at it, I rearrange the whole enclosure, angle the hide differently, to give her a bit more space. She does the climbing over the wall thing to get used to it and finally settles in plain sight. Never goes into her hide. Just sits on top of it. Then after two weeks she starts digging, but can't really make a real tunnel because she dug right to a wall. Sits there all crunched up in her small hole.

So I think her hide is not shadowy enough, or maybe she just discovered her love of digging after all this time. So I add a lot more substate so she can dig, I put her hide back where it was and fill it with substrate, make it really tight, so she has to excavate it herself, and really dark, so she feels safe. I even add a privacy wall out of leaves and sticks, of she wants to sit out, but still not be right where the light is. I give her a bigger water dish, so she can dip her feet in to stay cool. It's tarantula luxury estate is what I did.

It's been a month, she never tried to dig again. When she goes into her hide, half her butt hangs out, because apparently, she lost the ability to dig again and making the hole bigger seems like too much work. She walks straight trough her water dish and drags lots of dirt into it all the time. And most of the time she still sits there in plain sight. On top of her hide, or right by the glass surveying her kingdom. She's just a display T now suddenly when she was the shyest of the bunch before. I'm beginning to think all the changes were unnecessary, and I've been worrying over nothing. Serves me right for not letting her eat 5 small crickets anymore and instead trying to giver her dubia roaches that are way more appropriate for her size ^^ She'll eat the roach eventually, but not while I'm watching and she will give me evil eye the whole time^^

TL;DR: Tarantulas be tarantuling.

 

[Thekla]

I'm very, very sorry, but I have to announce: The war is lost. The water is dead.

It was an epic battle between the demon "Mazikeen" and the brave heroine of this story (well, that would be me ).

vs.

Forces on both sides were powerful and determined, and for the longest time, it seemed as if there was a chance. Even when the brave heroine had to retreat and let go of the legendary water dish as the fangs of the demon held on too strongly, she never wavered, never gave up and eventually, she saved the dish from the beast. The battle was won, but alas, not the war. When the time came to put the water dish back to its ancestral place, the demon struck, deadly and without mercy... death was instantaneous. Let us mourn together for this innocent life that is now gone forever.

 

[Brachyfan]

Today my new T's learned what moss is. They are little slings and their enclosures are too small for water dishes so I decided to wet some moss and use that.


B Auratum didn't react at all. Just shuffled over when the moss landed. No reaction from the liphistius either (even when the moss rolled onto its trapdoor).
My pulchra loves to climb so I decided " no moss for you!" so i will just put water drops on the side of the enclosure. She has already drank them!

My B Hamorii sling didn't seem to care about the moss but when I put water on the moss she freaked out and climbed straight up the wall! Stayed up there for a couple of hours. Poor girl got spooked but at least i know that she will bolt when startled.

The best reaction was my little E Campastratus. I put the moss in and no reaction. Dropped some water on the moss and she just went crazy! Grabbed the moss and proceeded to tear it to shreds! At first I thought she was thirsty but I believe that was a feeding response. She tore the moss into tiny pieces and tried pulling some into her little burrow. I just came back after several hours and now there is moss everywhere and she is sitting in a new "chair" that takes up half her burrow! That reaction is by far the funniest thing I've seen keeping Ts so far!

 

[Marika]

There's mold in my T. cyaneolum sling's enclosure I know it's not a big deal, but it annoys me.

My G. rosea sling who recently had a bad molt, seems to be doing fine, but hasn't eaten yet.

 

[Urzeitmensch]

Not exactly in the spider room but it shows that I probably think too much about Ts. We have a friend from Norway visiting us and we speak English since her German is as good as our Norwegian.

So I hear her commenting to my wife that a relative has really beautiful urticating hairs. After being completely baffled for some seconds I realized that she must have said curly hairs. But the image kind of stuck

 

[Arachnophoric]

So I finally stopped procrastinating and decided to start getting some of the N. incei slings into their own containers now that they're all 3rd instar. I thought this would be easy, just put their enclosure in a larger box and put that box in the bathtub, then slowly separate the group as they come out. In theory that should have been a simple way to go about it, yeah?

Except the moment I opened the lid, just about all of the damn slings decided to make a beeline for the exit. It was a floodgate being opened, a Niagara Falls out of the original enclosure, into the secondary box, and then out of THAT. It wouldn't have been so bad if I could close the secondary box and focus on catching the ones already making a run for it, but the stream of runners was so constant I'd have probably accidentally squished one in the process, and taking the time to clear the area would have given those already free of containment the time to escape further into my bathroom. So the next hour or so would be spent corralling baby tarantulas to stay within the bounds of my bathtub (which they most certainly did NOT want to do) and using souffle cups to contain them. Thankfully the slings did eventually stop coming out of the box and I could close that off, and finally capture the remaining escapees. By the two hour mark, I had everyone contained - 97 slings captured, with one unfortunate escape into the heat register. I'll be keeping an eye out, but I'm pretty certain that one is just gonna be gone for good. So with a total of 98 slings removed from the box, there should be 24 left IN said box to be separated as long as nobody got cannibalized.

So in the future, I'll be separating slings either at 1st instar as they go into premolt, or right as they molt into second instar. I am NOT doing this again.

 

[Arachnophoric]

A rather sad day - realized I hadn't seen my E. rufescens juvie out in a while so I went to investigate and found the poor thing dead in his burrow. He'd already began to mold, but I could make out a popped carapace that was stuck to his abdomen and his legs were bent all weirdly, so it looks like a bad molt took him. Just when i found myself thinking how lucky i was to have not encountered molting problems in my collection besides one early on in keeping. RIP Papyrus.

 

[Hoxter]

Yesterday I finally got to take back all my Ts to my home after 2 months of having my friend babysit them. So many of them actually has grown up, some seem to actually have molted twice. Unfortunately she didn't close one small enclosure properly and probably at night a P. regalis sling got away. I don't think we'll find it anytime soon so let's just hope it's alive and will come out one day, healthy and big.

And today I decided to rehouse my female M. robustum into something bigger as she seemed rather unhapppy with amount of substrate in enclosure. Now it should last for few more molts. It feels so good to be back on the track!

 

[Hoxter]

Didn't expect to write two posts in a row in this thread. Anyway, today I had a dubia emergency in my P. irminia enclosure which resulted in a rehouse to more practical home. She was amazing during the whole thing, gave me only one threat pose during removal of her hide and rest was just calm walk. I hope she'll like her new home, old one must've been so cozy.

 

[MintyWood826]

I fed my A. avicularia female a moth and it was entertaining watching her run around trying to catch it. It managed to escape her several times until she finally succeeded.

 

[krbshappy71]

Checked on everyone yesterday and set the cam to the S. calceatum sling, it is growing! Might rehouse it this weekend, already have a container ready. What do you think, leave it or rehouse? (it is on the right side of container in the front)