WARNING: This post may contain spiders. Or at least pictures of them. Don’t click through if you don’t want to see them!
Remember when I said that 11 spiders was quite enough and that we’d probably be sticking with that for a while? It totally wasn’t true. We are now up to 14 and may be going to the spider shop tomorrow for numbers 15 and 16.
In my defence only one of the three new ones is mine, and look at it:
It’s a spider with a heart on its bottom. Who could resist that?
That’s Thirteen, by the way; s/he is a Cyriocosmus sellatus (Peru Dwarf Tiger Rump), a dwarf tarantula, and that’s about as big as it’ll get. As for sex, all I know for sure is that it isn’t a mature male. I’m hoping it’s a girl, but we’ll see!
And here’s a bad picture of Basil, one of Mr Satu’s new ones, menacing a cricket:
Basil (the second of Mr Satu’s spiders to get an actual name) is a Chilobrachys fimbriatus, or Indian Violet tarantula.
His other new one is of the same genus, a Chilobrachys huahini. There are no pictures of it yet, but it’s a little monster beast. It lives in a plastic deli cup filled with a giant ball of webbing and dirt, and crickets are dispatched before you can even blink. This one will apparently get rather large. We’ll definitely have to move, or at least build an extension, when everyone starts to grow up.
Speaking of growing up: several of our babies have now moulted! (See Wikipedia for more details, but basically: tarantulas get bigger by growing a new exoskeleton inside their old one; when the time is right, they work their way out of the old skin and can then stretch the new one to the bigger size before it hardens.)
Here are some of their new suits:
Greenbottle blue before:
And after:
Mort before:
And after (not a great picture — he’s gone very shy):
Chaco Golden Knee before:
And after (still not coming out!):
And the one I’m most pleased about — my baby Merlin, before:
And after:
Isn’t that just the cutest spider in the world? (Just say yes.)
Mr Satu’s OBT and Skeletor also moulted at the same time as this lot, but they’re both too shy to have their picture taken (the OBT teases me by lounging out in the open, only to bolt as soon as I pick its jar up; Skeletor just hides). And just this morning, the Indian Violet did, too. It won’t be long before Socks’ moult now; her abdomen has turned very dark, which is basically the new skin getting ready under the old one. After that, it doesn’t usually take more than a week or two before the moult. It’ll be exciting to see such a big one doing it!
The final bit of news to report is that we’ve rehoused the P. miranda. Before, the spider looked like this:
Now, this is all we get to see:
We think it likes its new tank. It certainly seems to enjoy the crickets we throw in there, and is doing very interesting things with webbing and dirt. Sometimes we can just about see a fuzzy leg or two in the back of the cave. At least the spider is happy!
Edited to add: after I’d posted this last night, Mr Satu decided to actually check on this one — and it turns out it moulted, too. It’s still basically all legs, but longer:
On the far right you can just about see a bit of its cast-off moult. How we’re ever going to get that out, I don’t know.
And finally, an unidentified tarantula that we found in our bed:
It hasn’t shown any interest in crickets, and seems to be pretty happy just sleeping all day. It’s also very tame — it hasn’t tried biting or kicking hair once yet! I think we’ll keep it and call it … umm … Spidy!
