True spider sperm storage

[danread]

Does anyone kow if true spiders can store sperm after moult?. My female Cupiennius salei has laid a disk shaped egg sack which she is currently guarding. I'm unsure as to whether it will be fertile or not, as she has molted since i've had her, and hasnt been with my male yet.

Any thoughts?

 

[cacoseraph]

i'm pretty sure i've read that they can't store it between molts

but, as always, i could be wrong

 

[Stefan2209]

Cacoseraph is right, they can´t store the sperm. As with T´s when true spiders molt the spermatheque gets changed, too.

But even if they could store it, true spiders don´t molt anymore when they´re sexual mature, so if your female has done another molt, she hasn´t been sexual mature before...

Wish it´d be the other way round, my nice fat P. nigriventer female has built me a nice big cocoon last night. Damn, wish this would be fertile... :-/

Greetings,

Stefan

 

[danread]

Thanks for the info, i sort of knew that already, but i had to ask.

Do you have any suggestions as to how to proceed from here. I want to try and mate her with the male, but i think she may react aggressively if she is already holding a sac. Should i manually remove the egg sac, or will she eat it soon anyway knowing it's not fertile? Do you have any other tips with how to mate true spiders, i've not had any experience with this before.

Cheers,

 

[Stefan2209]

Hi Dan,

don´t know for sure what will happen if you take away the cocoon right now. As I´m having a quite similar problem right now, I´ve studied some papers about ctenid spiders over the weekend but I haven´t found a solution for this kind of problem.

If you have some time at your hands (e.g. your male is still sub-adult) I´d say, let the sac with her, till she decides to drop it.

If your short-handened with time (e.g. your male already adult and unpatentiently waiting) take away the sac right now.

The papers I read during the weekend regarding this kind of problem said the incubation-time of the cocoon should be something around 60 days, so if you let her keep the sac, be prepared to wait for at least 2 months...

Guess, if you let her keep the sac and it should indeed be fertile, you had something like a small sensation to show.

Hope this helps you at least a lil bit.

Greetings,

Stefan

P.S. If anybody can tell how soon after dropping a cocoon a ctenid can be mated again, replies would be highly appreciated!

 

[danread]

Hi Stefan,

thanks for the advice. The male i have matured about two weeks ago, so i was planning on leaving it another week and then mating them. I made the decision last night to remove the egg sac. Damn they really don't want to let go of the eggs. Every time i got hold of the egg sac with my 12" tweesers, she would pull it free and run up them! I finally got it though, and she spend the rest of last night pacing round the tank looking for her sac. I'm going to feed her up for a week or two on some roaches and then try and introduce the male. I'll let you know how it goes.

Cheers,


P.s good luck with getting the egg sac off the P. nigriventer, i think it would be a complete nightmare if its anything like my experience.

 

[Crotalus]

P.S. If anybody can tell how soon after dropping a cocoon a ctenid can be mated again, replies would be highly appreciated!

Dont rush it, because she will most likely lay a second sack after you hatch that one, and possibly a third even.

Take a look here for nigriventer info on mating:

http://www.minaxtarantulas.net/artiklar/phoneutria/phoneutria_e.html

/Lelle

 

[danread]

Edit: After a bit of looking, i actually have a pair Heteropoda venatoria, not Cupiennius salei. Thats what you get for trusting google image search! I imagine it's much the same with either though.

 

[Stefan2209]

Hi Dan, Hi Lelle,

sounds like an interesting experiences you had...
To say the truth I´m not too over-eager to take away the sac from my female...

Anyway, I talked to the guy from which I bought the spider and he said, the sac is to 99% infertile. He had tried to mate her, but the male was killed instantly and so there´s only a dim chance of slings...

What i´d really like to know is, if she´s really not fertile, will she built another infertile cocoon after she drops the first infertile one? I know true spiders can do this if there has been a successfull mating. The females keep building sacs till the whole sperm they had stored is used out. But keep they building "blind"-ones?

Dan, I have to say I find yiur little experiment quite interesting. I´d really like to know if you can indeed mate the female so soon after taking away an infertile sac...
To further enhance your chances of a successfull mating I´d try two things: use a terrarium as big as you have it for the mating. In case she should get aggressive towards him, he has more place to run and avoid the female.
Another try worth could be to feed the female just before you introduce the male to her. I have not tried this but found it in an script regarding the breeding of phoneutrias. As it is written, the female shall concentrate more on eating than on hunting, next is when her mouth is full, it´s harder for her to bite.

Keep us updated how your breeding goes.

Greetings from germany.

Stefan

 

[Wade]

I've bred H.venatoria and I simply kept them together in a largish cage with lots of stucture. The female never got aggressive with the male that I saw, and I only removed him after the female made her first sack! It IS important to remove him though, because I think his presence stresses her to the point of destroying the sac.

One thing that threw me off...are you sure the male is really mature? My male had reached a size where I assumed he was mature, and I paired them up and then he molted again! Fortunately, he survived living with the female as an immature. The adult male exceeded the legspan of the female, but had a much lighter build.

Wade

 

[danread]

Hi Wade,

I must admit, i'm not 100 % sure that he s mature, from what i've read it isnt as easy to discern as it is with tarantulas. He is much larger than the female, and is looking noticably thinner and leggy than he did after his last moult. The markings on his cephlothorax are also much darker and pronounced. I'll see if i can post some photos later tonight to let you make your own mind up.

Do you have any pictures of the setup you were keeping yours in? Also, getting ahead a bit of myself, how easy are the spiderlings to raise?

Cheers,

 

[danread]

for anyone else interested, there is a very good thread here on breeding this species.

My male is looking almost identical to Garys, so i think it probably is mature.

 

[Wade]

Wow, those were great pictures! I didn't actually witness the breeding with mine, I just let them cohabitate.

The thing that threw me off was that the male's carapace markings are very distinct well before his ultimate molt, but if he's leggy like in those pictures he's probably there!

I've paired them up a couple of different ways. Once I put the male and female together in a big plastic container with lots of cork bark. That time, the female died without making a sac, but I think that was due to her being too old (she'd already been mature for a year). The next time I had an adult pair, the female was living in a one gallon jar. I put the jar inside a clear plastic bucket with a few pieces of cork in the spaces between the jar and the sides of the bucket. I released the male into the bucket, took the lid off the jar, and covered the bucket. They lived that way for several weeks, and then the female made an eggsac. She ended up destroying it, which I think was due to the continued presence of the male, so I took out her jar (where she continued to hang out). I wrapped a piece of black plastic around half the jar to give her some privacy. She made a second sac, and a few weeks later, hundreds of spiderlings!

Raising them is easy, they are fairly hardy. You might want to keep them together for awhile and let cannibalism thin the numbers a bit, but don't do it too long or you'll end up with all females or only a few. They're a bit sensitive to overly dank conditions and benefit from more airflow than you'd typically offer a tarantula, but other than that it's easy. The hardest thing to deal with is their INCREDIBLE speed! If you think the adults are fast, wait till you see the spiderlings. I swear, they litterally teleport themselves. They move faster than I can see.

Wade

 

[danread]

Well i finally paired them up last night. I've been feeding the female for the last week with as many roaches as she will take, to try and reduce the chance of her eating the male. I'm keeping them in two seperate sweet jars, and i introduced them by pouring the substrate out of the males enclosure and placing it upside-down on top of the females jar (with the lids off). That way the male could walk out of his jar straight into the females. Unfortunately i dont have any photos of the process, as i've lent my camera to a friend, but i'l try and describe what happened:

He first of all spent about 10 minutes pacing around his jar until the female came up half way and met him in the join between the two jars. He then proceeded to climb on top of the female and start vibrating his palps on her abdomen. After a couple of minutes, he reached round to the underside of her abdomen with his palps (presumably to deliver the sperm). This lasted about 20 seconds, after which he would continue moving his palps on the top if her abdomen. He would then switch position, and reach round the other side of her abdomen. The whole process continued for about two hours with him alternating which side he reached round to fertilise her. After this time i found them as opposide ends of the jars, so i separated them.

I might leave it a few days and see if they look interested again, in which case i will pair them up. I'll see if i can get photos next time.

Cheers,

 

[Stefan2209]

Hi Dan,

thanks for the Update! Really amazing they can be mated so soon after taking away the sac. Good luck with that one!

Greetings,

Stefan