Another Addition to the Group

Today, I caught another jumping spider. And it is not an other Phiddipus Audax, but a Platycryptus Undatus. It is about the size of Waffles, and is similar in color, but lighter. I found her today when I was helping prepare my school's gym for a festival this weekend. She was at the back doors of the gym, clinging to the wall between the two double doors. She was pretty much frozen, and could hardly move. I brought her back to the lab and put her on the counter, and blew some warm air over her. Then I found a beaker and set it over the top of her to keep her from escaping. She stayed there until after school was out, about a half hour later, and was then put into a pickle jar that my teacher had in the lab. I went outside and got some rocks and small peices of bark and then put her in it. She climbed under a rock. I went and got a cricket and put in there with her and then we watched her watch it and then she just stayed away from it. About ten minutes before I started this blog, I went in to check on her and so far, the cricket is still alive. I think the new spider has some thawing out to do still, but she can run backwards pretty quickly, something I have yet to see Marbles or Waffles do.

Something else of interest is that I found a body of a Phiddipus Audax a couple feet away at the edge of a sink. Yes, it is a whole body, not a molt. :( My teacher was wondering if it is Marbles 1.0. He still thinks that it is possible that Marbles (the current one) is Marbles 2.0 and that I just found the first one, the one that got away from me just right before Thanksgiving break. It is amazing that if it is the first one and that there were more than one (and probably still are more somewhere), that it survived that long. I know I didn't see that body the other day, and for the last couple weeks, I have been in and out of that lab about as much as my teacher has been. (He is probably in there a bit more than me, but it is close.) (We don't have classes that require us to use it all the time, so it would seem that nobody else goes in there much. And we have spider haters, so they avoid it now that they know that the spiders are there.) So it is a very interesting find. I'm sad about it, but it is life and I can't save every single one that I find. And I'm fine with that. Infact, I don't want to save every single spider I find. It's just a hobby to me and having a few around is fun, but filling the whole room would drive my teacher mad and it would be just too much to handle. Plus, he would run out of crickets really, really fast. He has been kind enough to let me take a couple baby crickets from his cricket stash (for the rest of his own critters) and feed my spiders once a week. I don't think I will have any more spiders. Maybe one if I can find one, but that is pretty rare right now, although odd things happen, like the one today. 

I enjoy this hobby and would encourage you to go out and find a spider and learn about it. And if you find a jumping spider, that is great, but try to find something else. There are thousands of them out there, and you will mostly find the biggest, most common ones near you. But try to look for the spiders that nobody else has found. New spiders are being found constantly and who knows, you could become one of them. That would be pretty awesome. 

This has been Jumping SPiDER and I would like thank you for checking out this blog. I hope you enjoyed it and if you have any questions, comments, or almost anything that has to do with this blog, please leave it in the comment area below and I will do my best to get back to you. :) 

^oOO^o

Awesome pictures of Marbles and Waffles.

Here are some pretty cool pictures of Marbles and her new cage mate, Waffles. Yeah, I know you're probably going "Waffles?? WTH man?!" Haha. Marbles is bad enough, but I decided to name them something random. It could be worse.

The smaller, brown jumping spider is Waffles and she is a Phiddipus Audax like Marbles. I haven't seen a brown Phiddipus Audax before, so it had me thrown for a minute. She has the same markings too, although the orange on her back is a bit faded. I think she could be a bit younger than Marbles, but I don't really know for sure. 

Sorry if any of these photos are really fuzzy, especially the ones at the end of Waffles. She is fuzzy, but my iPod Touch camera is obviously no high end camera, so please bare with me!

The jumping spider on the top is Waffles while the other one barely hiding under the cup bottom is Marbles.

The smaller spider facing the camera is Waffles. The big black one is Marbles.

Uh oh! Marbles is sizing up her dinner...

"NO!! I'm telling you! Go away or I will be forced to use these!" Marbles isn't happy at the sight of Waffles.

"Ok, I will go now."

Or not. Look at Marbles fangs spreading apart!

Marbles: "Fine, if you're not going, then I will!" And she really did try to get away. But I stopped her from climbing over the side of the cage and she abruptly made a dive for the bottom of the enclosure.

Now it looks like Waffles is going to fight back. Luckily, they never did.

"...Yeah! That's it! Run!!"

Here is Waffles. I left the lid open on the enclosure and she climbed to the top of the styrofoam-cup-ring-jungle-gym and just sat there. I was really happy to get the pictures and she was more than willing to cooperate. Something Marbles rarely does when she gets to the top of the cup rings.

I moved my finger around just a few inches in front of her and she followed my every move. And then she turned toward the iPod just like I was hoping she would do! I love that face! Hahaha! :)

"...Wow! That human's finger is huge! Should I run??" Thankfully, she decided I wasn't doing anything to her and she just stayed there.

Watching my teacher clean out his turtle's "play bin". (He uses it to feed his turtle so that it helps keep his aquarium cleaner.)

That is one cute spider and she was really enjoying the view of my school's science lab. I think that she is a quite a bit more docile than Marbles and even though she can really move like other jumping spiders, she tends to be a bit slower and not so quick to just take off. I was also handling her before I took these pictures and she was happy to come out and climb all over my hands and arms. So far, she and Marbles are getting along in there enclosure and I will be keeping them until they die or summer break arrives--hopefully the latter. I will try to get some pictures of the back of her abdomen so you can see that she is a Phiddipus Audax, or something very similar. Like I said above, I have never seen a brown one before, as all I have seen are black ones. But either way, she is an awesome spider and I will be posting more blogs of her and Marbles in the future, so please look forward to them! 

If you think that you would like to have a jumping spider as a pet, you can't easily go wrong with them. They are really easy to take care of and so much fun to play with so long as they aren't too defensive. If you want, I can make a care sheet in the future if anybody would like one. I really didn't know a whole lot about how to care for them even after I caught Marbles. It has taken some research, and experience to figure out what they like to do and what they eat. I won't go into this any further as it looks like I will do a care sheet anyway. There is also a blog I posted a while ago about someone who pretty much made one from their experiences. 

Hope you enjoyed the blog and if you have any questions, please leave them below and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as I can.

The Bagheera Kiplingi

My second blog a while back was on some pretty crazy spiders and one of them was the Bagheera kiplingi. This is a pretty cool spider because one, it is a jumping spider and two, it is a vegetarian! Well, for the most part. 90% of it's diet is just plant matter, but I will get to that in a minute. They get their names from the characters in the book, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.The Bagheera kiplingi is named after Bagheera, the black panther, while the species is in honor of Kipling himself. Other salticid genera with names of Kipling's characters are Akela, Messua and Nagaina. All four were named by George and Elizabeth Peckham in 1896.

They are found in the Central Americas and Mexico. They mostly inhabit Mimosaceae trees, primarily the Vachellia, where they consume specialized protein- and fat-rich nubs called beltian bodies, which make up about 90% of the spider's diet. The spiders actively avoid the ants guarding the beltian bodies which also use the bodies for food. The spiders also eat nectare and will ocassionally steal larvae from the worker ants. The spiders will also cannibolize other B. kiplingi, especially during the dry seasons. Despite the occasional consumption of meat, the spiders' tissues have been found to exhibit isotopic signatures typical of herbivorous animals, implying that most of their food comes from plants. The mechanism by which they process and ingest the beltian bodies, is still unresearched. The vast majority of spiders liquify their prey using digestive enzymes before sucking it in.

While they are pretty much antisocials like other spiders, hundreds of them can be found in a single tree, usually twice as many females to males. They are found to be somewhat quasisocial as adult females have been found to guard clutches or hatchlings. 

These are pretty awesome spiders and I really think that it is odd that a spider consumes mostly plant matter for its diet. While it does consume the occasional spider, they aren't like any other spider that eats only meat. They are probably one of my favorite jumping spiders that you can find and I really think that they eat plant matter is pretty cool. I have read that other jumping spiders have been found to enjoy nectar while sitting in a flower waiting for a bee or other flower wandering insect to pass by. So finding a spider that is almost totally vegetarian is a little surprising, to me it isn't really as I have already known that other species enjoy similar things. They must have a sweet tooth.



Thanks for checking this blog out! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible. 

Another Update on the Jumping Spiders

Well, it is two days later and I have some pretty good news to share with you all. Yesterday, I found another jumping spider in the lab just above Marbles on the window sill. I really didn't notice it until I started to move Marble's cage around and then something black and fuzzy moved out of the corner of my eye. Yay! Another one. I had to leave it as my class was just starting, and I would be back to get it later. Luckily, it stayed in that area until I got back after school was out. It is another Phiddipus Audax like Marbles, but is a bit smaller and this one is brown-ish. Same markings, but they are more of a tan pale color than a bright orange like Marbles. And it is a female. It was decided that she go in the cage with Marbles along with three crickets. I have some pictures of them interacting with each other, luckily they weren't violant, but were very aware that the other one was there and they often threw threat postures while waiting for the other spider to strike. I am happy to say that they seem to be getting along with each other for the most part, but a cricket was gone when I came into the lab today. It had better be a cricket and not each other. I am going to have to be more aware of their abdomen sizes and when they each had a cricket last as to make sure they won't go hunting each other down. It is exciting for me to have two of them and even though I would love to have more, I think that two is plenty for this size of cage, as adding another one to the mix could bring great stress on the other spiders and one or more could end up dying. The good thing is that they are females and they can't have spiderlings together and I am glad for that as I don't have to keep track of lots and lots of baby spiders. They are fun to have around in there enclosure and I am glad that they will be allowed to stay around until summer break starts. They are both pretty young yet and I think that they newest one is even younger. So they should last a while.

I haven't come up with a name for the new spider yet, so if you have any ideas, please feel free to tell me what you think would suit the new one best.

Thanks for checking this blog out! If you have any questions about this blog, spiders, or anything else that you want an answer to (I would prefer that it be somewhat related to this blog), please leave it in the comment sections below and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible.

Other awesome blogs to check out!

Bills Cars and Computers
Graspvitality
Nathan3000368

Pictures will be posted later. I did attempt to take some yesterday, but they were kinda blury and I think that I will try to get some better ones. Jumping spiders aren't the easiest to film!

Update on Pet Jumping Spiders, Both at Home and at School. And HELLO TO 2014!!

Well, Christmas break is over and it is time to get back into the everyday grind. I had a good break and hope you did too. I wish it was longer, but then it would be harder to go back. As for the spiders, they are doing pretty well and I highly doubt they have noticed any difference in the daily routines. Marbles has built herself a whole lot of webbing all around the cage now and she even made another nesting spot on one of the Styrofoam rings. She seems happy and is doing pretty well. Devouring crikets and running about her enclosure, then watching as I walk up to her, and open the lid. She will either run for cover under the cup bottom or try to make a brake for it. Of course, she isn't fast enough and I blow a little air on her and she drops to the floor and runs for the other side. This went on for a few minutes today before she scrunched her legs up and just waited for me to go away.

The other little spiders that I have at home are doing pretty well so far. I sadly don't have anything I can feed them, so I will most likely be putting them outside this evening when I get home. They do seem to be bored except chase each other around in the jar. There are three of them now and if you saw the post I made the other night, you will know about the first two. During dinner, which was after that post, I saw another one wandering along the wall and ceiling and had to catch it before one of my parents disposed of it. It is the smallest out of the group, each of them are most likely juviniles which happen to be not more than a couple months at the most in age. Each of them is small enough that if they would sit still and not try to eat each other for just a minute, I could easily fit them on my thumb nail. However, if they are adults of some micro dwarf species, they are impressive. I think they are the cutest jumping spiders you could ever see apart from the Peacock Spiders, which happen to be about the same size. I did try to take pictures of these little guys, but I couldn't get my camera to focus on them very well, and they moved way to quickly.

Thanks for checking out this blog! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below and I will do my best to get back to you as soon as I can.

Other awesome blogs to check out:

Bills Cars and Computers
Graspvitality
Nathan3000368

Jumping spiders

I have two little jumping spiders right now, although they won't get to stay the night. I was in my room when I got a call from my mom that "two of my little friends" were hanging out on the ceiling in the dining room. She wanted them dead, but I insisted on keeping them a little bit. She let me get a jar from the garage and put them in it. One has been chasing the other one around a bit, so I can assume that one is a girl and the other is a boy. I don't know what species they are as they are very small, and I would post pictures, but my iPod won't focus on them for more than a fraction of a second. They are both fairly dark in color, almost brown and grey, but they have a light tan underside with dark legs with faint yellow stripes. They are pretty cute.