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...
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).
ReplyDeleteYour posts are really interesting - keep the updates coming!
Thanks Nicole! I will keep it coming. Have a great Mardi Gras!!
ReplyDeleteAnd 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.