by Jackuul » June 2nd, 2010, 1:52 pm
I used the old carapace under the microscope, since female spiders shed their... parts - while male spiders do not. There were two tiny spermatheca as far as I could tell, but this next time she molts... it will be a heck of a lot easier to tell since she is so much bigger now. She is honestly growing a lot faster than I expected, which is good because soon she will graduate from plastic bin to glass aquarium, and have her own digs.
I just need to find some 5.5 gallon aquariums that are cheap enough to be of use. Another factor in her growth is that I keep her on my sub-woofer (I never use it, so no, she isn't gangsta) which acts as a warming pad, keeping her little place around 80F at all times, and that makes a difference in her metabolism.
Before she molted her abdomen was absolutely huge - three times the size of her prosoma (head) and I expected that after she molted she would still be fat. As you can see, she is not so fat and I attribute this to the warmth of the woofer, allowing her to undergo the fast growth and use up all the fat stores.
When she reaches about 3 inches from front left to back right leg, I will slow down on her feeding (I already am slowing down now because she is reaching the size way faster than I expected) so that she won't be obese as an adult, and will live a long and happy cricket nomming life.
@TinaMartin
You should take some pictures if you can - when some families of Araneomorphs hatch, they will drop off of anything that acts like a platform with a trail of silk behind them to carry them away so that they will have less competition to food, and so that their mom wont eat them (not always is the mother spider like this - but it happens a lot).
Mygalomorphs (including tarantulas) and Mesothelae spiders are not capable (to my knowledge) of this sort of fantastic voyage, as they lack the refined spinnerets of the Araneomorphs and are mostly earthbound (with the exception of Arboreal spiders, which can leap from a tree to hopefully find a new branch, although their vision is still so poor that they really don't know where they are going - a leap of faith so to speak).
There are more species of Araneomorphs that are venomous to humans than Mygalomorphs, and none of the Mesothelae have venom sacs, but even so less than 1% of all the families of spiders are venomous to humans while 99.99% are beneficial.