22nd Feb . Here she is, proud as punch with yet another new egg sac, (furthest left) making 7 in total. The fourth is currently hatching. The second picture is the first lacewing dinner of the new year.
The story: Several weeks ago, a tiny spider made its home in my kitchen window. It built a succesful web and rapidly became a quite large spider. At this point, I took a personal interest. Whether I saw myself as a benevolent spider God, or just quite liked the idea, I couldn't really say. Either way, I started deliberately feeding it, with flies, craneflies and moths, until it rapidly became a very big spider. Then one morning, to my shock, I came downstairs to discover that my spider had created a large sack of babies! I'm a father! You will be able to follow their progress in the blog below.
4th April : Svetlana dropped dead at 11pm last night. This wasn't entirely unexpected as she hasn't moved for quite a long time. Her last weeks were a confusing time for her, as she frequently got lost and couldn't find her way home. I suspect that having considerably outlived her expected time, she had developed the spider equivalent of senility. Her legacy will be considerable, however, as 7 egg sacs has translated into an awful lot of baby spiderlings. Thanks for your support with this blog. It's been a learning experience, and I strongly encourage you to adopt a spider in your own home. Farewell, Svetlana... |
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22nd Feb . Here she is, proud as punch with yet another new egg sac, (furthest left) making 7 in total. The fourth is currently hatching. The second picture is the first lacewing dinner of the new year. |
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18th January: A couple of new pictures as the rest of the eggs hatched. There's third lot due in a week or two. There's probably 60 mini spiders running round my house somewhere at the minute. |
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3rd January: More hatchlings! They're out and about, and on the left is a new egg sac! She's sluggish but still working hard for her babies. The first batch appear to have migrated off round the house now. Maybe they're pouncing on dustmites as I write this. The mild winter has meant that there's still the odd fly to feed her with too. |
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11th December: Hatching! There's 20 babies in my kitchen! And this is only the start. I wasn't sure if they'd wander off or make webs, but one of them made a tiny web on another window. Unfortunately,with it being midwinter, they've hatched too soon and there's little chance of them surviving till spring. That said, it shows that the process is working well. There's still 3 more egg sacs to hatch over the next three months! The second photo is of a baby, as small as a pinhead! |
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30th November: A 4th Egg sac! This is getting ridiculous. I'll be overwhelmed come spring! The second picture is the spider in my dining room which managed to overpowe a fly twice its size tonight. |
16th November: Well, through my own naivety I nearly screwed up massively. Spying a tasty bug a couple of days ago, I trapped it in a glass and brought it in for Svetlana to eat. Only when I'd dropped it in the web, did I realise there was a problem. She ran down, took one look at it, swung away on a strand, Indiana Jones style and legged it round the window sill as fast as she could. That's when I realised I'd put a spider killing parasitic wasp in her web. I had to extract the thing, and get it outside. I'm now reading up about wasps, but it was almost too late. Fortunately, no harm was done, and I managed to say sorry with a very large fly last night. |
Pages last updated 22.2.2007
