Black Widow | From the Desktop of Sid and Nata

After a trip on Thursday to GBU Enterprises, I came home with some new bugs, a creature I have never kept on the Desktop before, and a critter that was happily released right after I snapped it’s photo.

A turtle, obviously. Something I have NEVER kept before.

3 Madagascar hissing beetles! Yep, I am bringing them back to the zoo!!

A Black Widow and her brood. After photos, they were kindly released away from my home and back into the wild!

She had a few hundred in there, I think. Now, they will be ‘enjoyed’ by the folks of Stockton, CA.

A Pink Toed spiderling 1″ whom I am still trying to name. Sid IV, if you will.

A cool shot of the spiderlings backside, and as one of the forum members pointed out, the spiderling resembles a Green Bottle Blue, though I doubt GBU made that big of a mistake. I am quite certain this is an avic.

I had a great time interviewing one of the co-owners of GBU. and may even be volunteering there if I can get out of some engagements that will take up most of my time over the next month or so. In the meantime I will be enjoying these new additions, and hopefully will acquire more to begin doing private bug-shows and maybe getting back into selling again. Who knows!

IT’S A BOY!!!

Mitzy, my fuzzy Lasiodora parahybana (also acquired from GBU back in February) has turned out to be a boy. I’m toying with renaming him, but may keep it the same just to throw people off. Even though he will not (most likely) have the opportunity to reproduce, I will still enjoy watching him grow, and will be keeping him as a personal pet, along with Serj, my A. chalcodes female. Serj, who can live for up to 25ish years, will hopefully become a companion for my son when he goes to college. He’s 1 now, so just 17 years to go!

Spider Bugs (a10com.wordpress.com)

Back when I was living in Barstow, I thought it would be cool to keep a Black Widow. Having had one brought to me, I kept it in an old, unused baby bottle. Halloween was about 3 weeks away, so I figured that the widow would be comfortable in this type of enclosure until the holiday, after which I was going to release it into the wild.

Every day I gathered as many bugs as I could find to ensure that my little Widow would not go hungry. I would drop 2, sometimes 3 bugs a day into her bottle thinking that she would be overjoyed at the abundance of food.
Over the course of a few days I started to notice how fat she was getting, and I just chalked it up to good eating, and great care-giving on my part.

She had affixed a web at the top of the bottle, where she would eat and hang all day.
Every morning I would check on her, and make sure that she was eating well.
She grew fatter and fatter until one morning, I found her hanging in her web as usual-with one exception;

My Widow’s bottom half had fallen off.

She never made it to Halloween, and I have since learned to not use food as a means to make one happy.
Lesson learned.
RIP Little Widow.