Well, the title kinda says it all. It is a sad day in the epic world of Epic Spiders. The awesome Waffles was killed on February 14, 2014. Time is unknown. I walked in on the scene this morning to find that a new P. Audax spider was discovered this morning running around on the counter and my teacher managed to catch it and put it in the cage with the other two. It turns out that it was hungry. Very hungry. And so it grabbed Waffles. My class that I have is just before noon, which is just before lunch. It was a bit of a startling discovery to see that, after I picked the cage up to see where everybody was, a spider had another one in it's jaws. At the moment, I don't really know who I thought it was as I am writing this at 9:30 in the evening and don't really remember it all that well. But I remember running out out of the lab into the classroom and told my teacher that there was another spider in the cage and either it was eating somebody or somebody got it. He followed me back to the enclosure and was also surprised to see the dead spider. Then after some more careful investigating, (like almost turning the whole thing over and looking underneath to get a better look at the spiders. Everything is "glued" down by the silk that they leave everywhere, so their stuff almost literally stays in place) ,to my dismay, I made the awful discovery that it was Waffles who was being eaten. And I noticed that it was indeed the new spider.
This new spider is pretty much like Marbles. Very similar in size and pretty much the only way to tell who is who is that the new one has slightly faded orange markings on it's abdomen whereas Marbles' markings are much sharper and brighter. The new spider I think is already going to be a problem and I will be curious to see who will be left on Tuesday when I return to school. I already caught them in threat postures towards each other a couple times on video and will be posting them soon. I also have a couple shots of the body of Waffles. Sadly, they aren't of very good quality as I shot everything with my iPod Touch 5 gen. But they are interesting and after school, my teacher and I were messing around with a couple microscopes so we could get some good up close looks at Waffle's hair, eyes, and fangs. It was very interesting.
So this has been a very interesting day. I am sad and yet happy that there is a new addition to the group. Who knows. One of them could be dead by Tuesday and we will be back to square one. (Almost. I forgot about my Platycryptus Undatus. It is doing well. More on it later. It helps that it is living in its own separate container.) This is spiders we are working with, so it is really amazing that Marbles and Waffles actually lasted as long as they did. I did not expect this to happen this way, but I knew it was a possibility from the beginning. It just took forever to happen and so it is a greater shock to me. But its life and this happens all the time, everywhere in the world where there are spiders. Yep, sad fact.
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----------------------------------------------RIP Waffles---------------------------------------------
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Pictures of Waffles
~JUMPING SPiDER
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