Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Baby Spiders
Well lost another male to a voracious female the other day!! Oh, well. Anyways, I have finally figured out how to rear my spiderlings successfully! I have isolated them in screw cap vials. I feed them about once a week with a knat-like insect. These babies are about the size of your pencil point and they spin the much larger insect up in their web. It is pretty phenomenal! I should be doing some more collecting at the zoo with Dr. Christenson on Friday. Hopefully, I will be able to ask him some questions about the experimental design. More to come about the project after Mardi Gras...
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2 comments:
Wow, I'd heard about some spider species where the female consumed the male during mating, but I thought this behavior was limited to just a few species (e.g., black widows).
Your posts are really interesting - keep the updates coming!
Thanks Nicole! I will keep it coming. Have a great Mardi Gras!!
And as far as females consuming the males during mating in spiders, I do think that this may be more common with the ones I am breeding in captivity. Though, I feed them a day before I mate them, the females used for mating are kept isolated in their own clear cylindrical container. They therefore only see potential prey when I put it in their containers. It is not as if they have a pool of insects teeming below them. Perhaps they are more opportunistic. This said, I have actually seen one of the free-roaming female spiders in the aquaria which contains a mealworm colony actually spin up a male after mating. So really, I don't know. My guess is that it is not horribly uncommon but probably not the norm. The poor females have such large energetic demands. They have a much larger body size that is continually growing, which requires molting often. Then they have to produce eggs, spin an egg sac, and then tend it.
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