Tarantula Diary

Since the last molt, it must have been 2 months. With full cricket diet (for first time)! The T had huge appetite. No wonder that now must have taken almost 1cm. more. You can see in the molting skin pictures (next post), it had almost 4cm leg-span. But now, it’s caparace is double. No meals to come!!

I think i must change it an enclosure soon though. The current one looks pretty good in width, but i’m not that sure about the height. Maybe i should lower a little bit the ‘soil’… Also: still i’m looking for an acrylic box to put an arboreal sling inside, but nothing… 

I found some really good plastic spice boxes today, but they’re quite expensive (10 euros), and pretty thick to drill..

Till the next time guys!

So.. apparently, the mealworm i ‘borrowed’ from the pet shop, so many days ago -since then living inside the crickets’ box- has molted and now it’s on the pre-beetle phase. Crazy, eh?

(It moves when you touch it.. “Hey who’s there? Leave me alone”!!!)

So i’m going to return from holidays and i’ll probably find a beetle chasing around mini-crickets. Well, what can you do?

Happy Holidays everybody!!

So far i’ve been feeding my Ts those Bean weevils; well eating them 2-2 every time. Now my colony is in pregnancy phase and my GBB in.. hunger phase. So i thought to give it a shot and buy a mini crickets box (Acheta domesticus), which at first i was hesitant to try -too large for the T’s ‘mouth’ and so on.

Just to say, leaving the pet shop, i ‘borrowed’ one small mealworm just to try it as an alternative option. At first the T jumped on it, but seemed like the worm was sturdy enough for it, and so after a couple of minutes it quit. The worm remains alive and walks around among 50 crickets..

 (Ha, look who prevailed..)

Anyway.. apparently i was wrong about the sling’s capabilities. It grabbed and devoured those crickets so easily and with such appetite, that after 3-4 of them, it’s abdomen is 3 times larger than what it used to be; it’s like of a larger T. So i guess that i’m expecting moulting period soon enough; it took way longer with those small weevils for a food.

You can see some parts of a cricket in these photos.

I have to say, that this forthcoming phase, that a sling transforms into a sub-adult really makes me doubt whether this ‘hobby’ really excites me or not. They look like more of a (stereotypical) disgusting huge spider that you find behind the toilet (to which, by the way, i feel no inconvenience any more), rather than a growing impressive animal.

By the way, i’m thinking in buying a Venezuelan Suntiger sling (since i haven’t seen any more interesting arboreal T available). So i’m doing some maths to invest also in a ‘new’ digital camera -i haven’t brought any with me here. So better photos are to be expected soon, than these almost watercolor ‘illustrations’ of a T.

Ta ta!

Since my last post, i had to move to another town. So i prepared all my kits, and packed my slings in that way that so many keepers suggest. In small boxes, trapped around soft and wet papers towels. Besides, it was only for a couple of hours, but carried in my backpack, on a plane.

So it seems that somehow i made a mistake while i was packing my Martinique -it wasn’t easy thing to do anyway. And this is the result.

Poor thing! My first T, got suffocated. My heart hurts.

So my new generation of weevils ‘appeared’ and i had again live-food to give my Ts to. The versi was like crazy -poor thing. The GBB seemed like it didn’t care. 3 days later i tried again, and instead of seeing my T, i saw “two”. It had molted. And it was fine: all legs on board. Fantastic!! It’s clearly larger. It’s feet seem like antennas, and the caparace is.. larger. ‘Κεφάλα μου’! (Μy big-head). The two replenished feet are a little smaller, but on the next change there are going to be fine.

So these are some pics i shot with my crappy phone camera.

1. freshly molted. you can see the ‘wet’ soft tissues and the 2 smaller feet.