Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 1:18 pm Post subject: EXO: Poecilotheria regalis
Successful
August 8, 2006
The Lovelife of Ginjerofer
My female molted out 3-5 months ago, my male molted out ~1 month ago. I have had the female for ~10-12 months and have been feeding her well. After the male molted mature i fed her a pinkie and one of each kind of roach i keep and some waxworms. When she had a big beautiful booty and i was confidant the male was charged and ready to exoskeleton down i introduced the male into the female's cage. She is in a large *horizontally* oriented Kritter Keeper with a 1Gallon Jug (that used to be her home) buried at an angle in the substrate. She has made her lair under the jug instead of in it as i was expecting her (::lol::, so i have a terrestrial regalis).
I introduced the male ~July 28, 2006. As of yesterday he had spent just about 10 days in the cage with the female. They always rested in seperate parts of the cage. The day prior to removing him i watched her chase him around... she was drumming drumming drumming and he was running running running... he drummed just enough to keep reminding her that he was not a meal with eight legs.
I removed him last night and i *think* he has already built a sperm web. I am going to give him a week to recover and have ample time to build a SW for sure and then reintroduce him to Ginjerofer.
pictures.
the male. this is actually after the first week or so he spent in the females cage. he went from looking relatively similar in coloration to a female regalis in his penultimate instar to this in his maturing molt
zoom
Gingerofer's whole cage. That leatherman is four inches long, but at a funny angle to make it easy to estimate her size in the pic. she is 6-7"DLS (15-18cm)
A good view of her (look at the purple blush around her eyes!!!) (n.b. this is Ginny about 2 wks before laying her sac)
closer CLOSER!
UPDATE
Ginjerofer made an eggsac around October 19-21, 2006
this puts gestation at around 3 months.
bear in mind that for at least half of that time Ginny was in a room that was hitting around 100*F during the day and was well above 90*F at night, so this might have "compressed" the gestation time a bit.... and it is just now starting to get beneath 80*F in my room. after i mated her i flooded her cage a few times. The last flood was the biggest... i poured at least a liter of water in there and all the substrate was completly soaked for a couple weeks after. I flooded her ~3 times starting about a month after she was bred and stopped about two months after she was bred, as i didn't want her to have to try to make a sac in a swamp
the bad news is that i am right in the middle of moving and am going to attempt moving Ginny, sac, and cage all together. For a more nervous spider i would most likely wait as long as possible and then steal the eggsac and manually incubate it... but i have faith in gentle giant Ginny
plus, she was fall down stupid easy to breed so i can always try again...
note also, i used flooding but no cooling... quite the opposite in fact!
note to mods: could you please merge this to the post i am paraphrase quotign here?
Nov 2 2006
I moved Ginjerofer and the eggsac on Halloween night. I wrapped the cage in a large blanket and had my new room mate hold the cage in his lap and try to absorb as much energy from driving as possible.
~24h after the move and she still had the eggsac, as far as i could see
here is a picture of the egglaying/brooding chamber. she spun this up a week or so before she made the eggsac, iirc
zoom
Nov 14 2006
WOOHOO!
i stole the eggsac from Ginny at around day 20. this is a little earlier than i would have... but my room mate has successfully rebuilt his recording studio and was testing his monitoring system... at like ~120 decibels
it went amazingly smoothly... i love Ginny more and more every day!
here is the video. i got a camera man now!
[YOUTUBE]E9cz5xeQF6I[/YOUTUBE]
p.s. i did this a while ago, but i said a bad word in the original video and had to edit it out. you can probably tell where it is, if you watch closely
Nov 19 2006
i peeked on the eggs. to do this i VERY carefully cut layer by layer until i could see the eggs.
Nov 20 2006
hehehehe
when i was rotating the eggsac tonight an egg fell out. so i took pics zoom
also, i was peeking in the eggsac some more and i saw a couple eggs with legs! you can just barely make it out in the zoom zoom
November 24, 2006
I decided to spill a few more eggs out of the eggsac for observation and picture documenting their growth. I got lucky and spilled a little embryo/post-embryo level pre-sling i really need to hit the books to refresh my terminology!
kind of ventral view. you can see the little fang buds in the zoom!!
zoom
dorsal view. i think these pics are interesting because you can clearly see the spider is like, developing on the side of the egg, sort of. it seems like the spider is mostly developed from the pedicle on up, as it were.
zoom
eventually the eggs became infected with mold. the only survivor was a nymph i experimentally sent to someone in trade. still a success though =P
i bred that same spider again about 6 months ago and got an eggsac about two weeks ago _________________
Quote:
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
coll well be expecting them as gifts and door prizes at an upcoming bbbbbbbbbbq _________________ “Look down at me and you see a fool;
look up at me and you see a god;
look straight at me and you see yourself.”
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