Spider Lair

Dice spiders! (plus the rest of my spider collection)

I buy one of these every year at the Renaissance Festival, which was cancelled this year due to COVID. :( 

The purple d20 is my favorite (I should have flipped her over because the underside of the dice is marbled with white but I DIDN’T THINK OF IT AT THE TIME sorry) but d12s are under appreciated and I love that they had a spider d12! 

So much eternal love for my little angel

Arachne

Ovide Moralisé, Paris ca. 1330

basically, there's been an ants' nest near a vent shaft of this abandoned Soviet bunker for decades. the nest spilled over into the bunker itself at some point once it was abandoned and there was no way for the ants to make their way back up to the nest, no queen but a constant supply of new colony members raining down from above, and no source of food in the bunker other than the corpses of their fellow ants.

fast forward to some scientists looking for bats that stumble on what's basically a post-apocalyptic ant society. they go "holy fuck" start studying, and observe that, all things considered, the ants still pretty much act like regular ants doing regular ant things.

fast forward some more, and the scientists feel like they have enough data from observing the colony as-is, so they decide to try an experiment. they put a little walkway between the bunker colony and the og colony in the vent shaft so the bunker colony members have the option of leaving and rejoining the og colony.

spoiler alert: every single ant in the bunker immediately nopes the fuck back to the colony in the vent shaft. within days the bunker is completely empty. the scientists leave the walkway in place so when more ants inevitably fall back down the vent shaft they can just climb back up instead of starting up the cycle anew.

After a very long time of not having Tarantulas, we have finally been able to get some more! I'm so excited you have no idea. Say hi to my new babies!

A. Versicolor

B. Emilia

B. Boehmi

P. Cancerides

Lampropelma sp. "Borneo Black"

L. Violaceopes

The Violaceopes is not pictured as it is currently burrowed, but I will get photos as soon as I can.

Now all we need is names 🤔

Don’t know if I sent this one yet, but here’s this lovely tarantula I found that was sitting on a nice rock during a sunny day a couple of years ago. Almost looked like some roots pushing out of a crack in the rock. Found in Oklahoma.

Meet Charlotte! A couple years ago I was in a pet store with no intention of making a purchase and they had a tarantula that had lost a leg at some point- the regrown one was small, so she was marked down. Me being me I just had to have a look at her and the moment I opened the container she popped out, up my arm and on my head.  We’ve been friends ever since.  I don’t pick her up unless I have to but whenever I open her house for her to come out and walk around she inevitably ends up on me somewhere, (She still favors my head for some reason.) Because of this her nickname is “Hat.”

I flipped over a rock and found a tarantula sharing its burrow with a tiny narrowmouth toad

This is a symbiotic relationship where the tarantula provides protection and affordable housing, while the toad feeds on ants that could harm the tarantula or its eggs. Other small frogs, lizards etc. are just prey to tarantulas, but they instinctively recognize and welcome narrowmouth toads for their ant-eradication abilities.

Basically, tarantulas keep tiny toads in their home for the same reason humans domesticated cats. This sort of went viral as a piece of trivia a while back, but there’s not a lot of actual photos showing it.

This isn’t the only case of this I saw either. I saw two other burrows with toads in them, including a massive tarantula that had at least 4-5 toads, but they hopped deeper into the burrow before I could take pics.

Anyway here’s some better quality photos I took of both animals during the day. The toad is Gastrophryne olivacea and the tarantula is an Aphonopelma species (probably hentzi but their taxonomy is a clusterfuck)