Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Critter foo
How to Avoid Spiders
Hi, Tarantula Lady here.
In defense of spiders, I’ve got to say, they’re not as bad as you might think. No spider is interested in attacking a human; they just want to get away. If you learn a little bit about them, you can avoid most problems.
1) Black widows and brown recluse spiders can be dangerous but they are very reluctant to bite you; they’d rather escape. In order to be bitten, you have to corner them somehow and then press your skin against them. NEVER kill them by crushing them against your skin. You’ll drive their fangs in and envenomate yourself. It’s like jabbing yourself with a poisonous needle. If they get on you, brush them off and then nail them with something like a flyswatter if you want to kill them.
2) If you see a spider wandering around your house, it’s a male looking for a mate. I don’t have a big problem with someone killing it, since the critter doesn’t have much longer to live, probably a few months at best. However, he isn’t interested in attacking you; he just wants to meet up with a female.
3) Spiders don’t live in your toilet. There are no documented cases of someone being bitten on the ass while sitting on the toilet.
4) Spiders don’t bite you in the exact center of your forehead while you’re sleeping at night. There have been reports of people developing ulcers in the middle of their foreheads which are blamed on house spiders. It’s way too suspicious that the “bite” is so precisely located in the exact center. I think these people have shingles since that disease has a symmetric pattern of rashes and sores.
5) Spiders are not well studied animals because pesticide companies won’t fund any research on them. They’re beneficial predators and farmers _don’t_ want to kill them. Only harmful pests get lots of research. However, a heart medication has been developed from the venom of a Mexican Red Knee tarantula.
6) Tarantulas are big and hairy but a lot of them are bizarrely good natured. No one has ever died or developed ANY permanent health problems from a tarantula bite; it might be rather painful, though. Most New World species are docile and can be handled with very little danger but there are some exceptions; they also have VERY irritating hairs so leave them alone unless you read up on them. If you see tarantulas wandering around at night in the Southwest, they’re, you guessed it, short-lived males looking for a mate. The females stay safe in their underground burrows. Old World species can be pretty foul-tempered, but, hey, they’re not in the U.S. or much in Europe. They’re predominantly in the warmer parts in Africa and southern Asia. They can’t survive in colder regions like northern Europe. There are no native U.S. tarantula species east of the Mississippi; there is one small colony of escapees in an orange grove in Florida.
7) Full-grown tarantulas don’t suddenly erupt from cacti. In the U.S., most tarantulas live in arid regions in the southwest. The females generally stay in their burrows. After mating, she’ll build an eggsac, and after a few months, 1/4″ spiderlings emerge. They usually disperse but a few may hang around Mom who will feed and take care of them.
That’s everything I can come up with right now. If people want to avoid a particular type of animal, they should learn a little about them. It’ll be easier to figure out ways to stay away from them.
Arachnophobia!
Not two years ago, if I found a spider in the bathroom I’d scream like a banshee. Just ask my wife.
“Karen! A spider!”
“So?”
“Do something, anything!”
Yes, those were the days. A time of peace and tranquility, when I didn’t share my bedroom with forty tarantulas. Yeah, you heard me.
It wasn’t always this way. As a kid, I used to catch flies and throw them into spider webs. And before you ask, no, I didn’t wet the bed, set fires, or torture small animals (except by feeding flies to spiders, of course).
I’m not sure when spiders began creeping me out, or why. I do know that I got over it fairly quickly. Nothing like constant exposure to take you past your fears.
Once Karen started collecting, oh boy did she start collecting. She says it’s a chick thing.
Think about it. Tarantulas could be feminist mascots. The females are bigger, faster, smarter, and longer-lived than males. They control the sexual encounter, not the boys. For every time a male eats a female, it goes the other way 1000 times. Nor does the female always eat the male after sex. If she has a good time, she’s free to keep him around for future flings.
But back to the main focus of this blog: me. I mean, arachnophobia. I still won’t let the tarantulas crawl on me, but I help Karen out from time to time. Lifting cages, for example — I’m good at that. And pointing things out. “Oooh, Karen, look at the fat ass on that one.”
For the arachnophobes in my audience, I’m going to give you a gradual introduction to spiders. Desensitization therapy: that’s the name of the game. We’ll begin with the new image for Karen’s blog (over there on the right somewhere). Isn’t she cute? And so yummy, too. Is there anything better than candy corn fangs?
D.
More hot spider action
This is Karen’s favorite tarantula mating story, which she learned secondhand at the ArachnoPets forum.
When tarantulas mate, the male needs to have access to her epigynum* in order to do the deed. This orifice is on the undersurface of her abdomen, so he needs to get beneath her in order to inseminate her. Good technique (from the male’s point of view) requires that he also restrain her fangs with special hooks on his forelegs. Restrained fangs are safe fangs.
Once, a male got beneath his intended and began to push her up and back. Everything went swimmingly — he had her fangs hooked, he had great access to her epigynum — so swimmingly that he got a bit overzealous and kept pushing.
I want you to imagine, for a moment, the first step in building a house of cards: one playing card tilted against another . . . so . . . precariously.
He overbalanced the female. She fell on her back, and he fell atop her, and I’m sure they would have had a good, long chuckle over it, told stories about it to the grandkids, maybe even exaggerated a detail here and there, but for one sad fact: the female, surprised by the fall, flashed her fangs, impaling her hapless lover. The rest, as they say, is dinner.**
D.
*Or, in tarantula-speak, ruby fruit jungle.
**A few of you will recognize this story from my NiP. Bare Rump is still recovering from the emotional scars of that fateful encounter.
Everything I know about sex I learned from my tarantula
Karen mated her Avicularia metallica pair today, her first breeding effort thus far (not counting Jake), and I am happy to report success.
This was a quiet male, not a Mr. Tappy-Toes like Karen’s P. metallica. However, judging from the impressive menschlichkeit* of today’s performance, he must have been tap-tapping away and setting up his sperm web.
If tarantulas were humans, sex would go something like this. The man goes off into the bathroom, does the deed, and comes back into the bedroom with a loaded turkey baster. You’re thinking: yup, not very romantic. Or perhaps you’re thinking: eeeww.
But you’d be wrong. Yes, the male ejaculates long before having sex. He does it into a sperm web, and then he charges up his pedipalps (anterior appendages, quite near the fangs) with a nice hot (cool, actually) load of spunk. Intercourse requires that the male insert his pedipalps into the female’s epigynum. Without, mind you, getting eaten first.
Karen placed our studly A. metallica into the female’s cage and that bad boy crawled right on up to her. He signaled his interest by thrumming her web. She ran to the other side of the cage. He gave her a bit of space but never let up on the thrumming. Soon enough, he had her in the mood. He got beneath her and was so confident he didn’t even bother to hook her fangs. (Males have hooks on their forelegs just for this purpose.) Then he started to work his pedipalps closer, closer, making small circular motions over her twitching epigynum.
Okay, it wasn’t twitching. I made that part up — but only that part.
One pedipalp found its way home, probing deeper. Deeper still. Then, no slouch he, he came at her with the other pedipalp! “Faster,” she moaned —
Sorry.
Bottom line, he did the deed and Karen got him out in one piece. She’ll let him charge up another sperm web, and maybe bring them together again next week. For today, he’s back in his cage, toweling off. I dropped a cigarette in his cage — a reward for a job well done.
D.
*Manliness, for everyone out there who is neither Jewish nor Gabriele.
I’m a Tarantula Nerd
Hey, there’s a reason I chose Tarantula Lady as my ID.
A week ago, I posted that I would try to mate a pair of my Avicularia metallica tarantulas. The female was throwing up, however. I’m serious, tarantulas throw up sometimes. I was concerned she was ill (no, she did not have morning sickness), so I postponed their date. Well, they just did the deed and we saw the male got in some inserts. I took him out and he’s cleaning himself off at the moment. I’ll probably put them together in a week or so; this will give him a chance to recharge his bulbs with sperm.
Want a detailed explanation of the mating process? Go to Arachnopets.com.
Hamachi, we hardly knew ye
Did you know we used to raise chameleons?
Meet Hamachi, a prime specimen of Chameleo quadricornis, the Four-horned Chameleon. In case you’ve never watched Jeff Corwin, here’s what’s neat about chameleons. Old World chameleons have opposable fingers, prehensile tails, independently mobile eyes, and personality to burn. They also despise one another, even while mating. Especially while mating. Imagine Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Liz Taylor and Richard Burton doing it on the living room floor. Chameleon sex makes that look civil.
Chameleons do not change color to blend with their surroundings. They do change color to reflect their mood. Vivid colors indicate amorous interest. Black means, “Go away, I hate you.” Chameleons housed together are black chameleons. Keep them together too long, and they die from stress.
My abortive first novel Karakoram featured a race of intelligent, six-foot-long chameleons called the Amanu. By developing a variety of adaptations to their mutual loathing, they’d managed to develop a sophisticated culture, one with a complex (and, to an outsider, tortured) social dynamic. The male to female ratio averaged 10:1. Females controlled all wealth and property, and were polyandrous. Husbands engaged in all manner of high risk activities in order to attract their wife’s attention.
Here’s a bit of hot Amanu sex, cribbed directly from my observation of the habits of Chameleo calyptratus, the Veiled Chameleon. Frank’s a human (well — sort of human) observer; Captain Leo is a Caravellier (kind of a space pirate); Vera is his wife. He’s flown a long way for this.
Frank felt a rush of air, then gaped in shock to see Leo viciously attacking Vera! The force of his tackle nearly knocked her from her perch, but she clung tenaciously with her back limbs and tail. The Captain’s jaws locked on her back, and dark drops of blood spattered the ground. Vera’s head and front limbs arched backward at an impossible angle. Her mouth gaped, she hissed loudly, and caught one of Leo’s back legs in her jaws. Now Leo’s blood joined Vera’s on the floor.
Our chameleons never shed blood, but I do remember, with our first Chameleo calyptratus mating, Karen crying out, “Separate them — he’s killing her!” Followed shortly by, “Uh. Uh. Uh, he’s not killing her.”
But I miss Hamachi. We kept him on a Ficus tree in a back room, and damned if he wouldn’t march across the entire house three times a day to do battle with our male Chameleo pardalis, Thor. It was all Karen could do to keep them separate.
Folks who raise chameleons either spend half a day misting their pets, dripping water on them, and hand-feeding them, or else they turn their homes into rain forests. We bought Thor from one such hobbyist. His carpets were moldy from the humidity, and crickets crawled everywhere. He, his wife, and several small children lived in their own private Madagascar.
Eventually, we realized that the difficult part of chameleon husbandry was not keeping them alive, nor mating them, nor getting them to lay eggs. Hatching the eggs — that was the problem. After incubating a dozen or more clutches (30 to 70 eggs per clutch) and getting perhaps 15 viable young, we decided we weren’t cut out for this business.
Good thing I had a day job.
D.
I won’t be posting on Sunday
Seriously, tomorrow is tarantula feeding day and maybe I’ll get around to trying to mate my pair of Avicularia metallica tarantulas. Hopefully, the female will play nice.
Our newest pet
I wanted to name him Rabies, but Jake decided to call him Meow Mix. He comes around nightly for a free handout.
Meow Mix begging for more Meow Mix.
Breath-holding; another vertebrate
Karen took Jake to the neurologist’s neurologist yesterday afternoon. On call, hammered by an emergency, and close to two hours late, but he managed to make time for my son and do a complete neuro exam. My hero! It never fails to impress me when I find a good doctor; I’m so used to the opposite.
He thinks Jake may have chronic viral meningitis (which is what my internist — another good doctor — thought, too). He wanted to do a lumbar puncture, but he was running too late. He had Karen call me to ask whether I would trust any of the Crescent City doctors to do an LP on my son. (No.) Currently, the plan is for Karen to take Jake back to Medford on Monday, to some hotshot pediatrician who does lumbar punctures on kids all the time.
You might ask what good this will do. Well, there is something to be said about knowing. Beyond that, there’s no treatment for chronic viral meningitis. Just have to wait it out.
On the up side, his headache has been better for over 24 hours now. This is significant. In the last 10 weeks, he’s had only one or two other breaks from the headache, and those lasted only a few hours. With any luck, this whole thing might pass, and Jake won’t even need an LP.
***
We home-school Jacob, which is a damned good thing, since with this illness he hasn’t accomplished more than two full days’ worth of work in the last 50 school days. A few weeks ago, to con him into doing a bit more work, we promised him another kitty. That will make three cats — four, if you count Tolerance, who ran off some time ago. Tolerance was Jake’s favorite, so this new kitty is sort of a replacement cat.
We bought a calico from the Humane Society. I’ll post a photo ASAP. Jake named her Emerald, which is a fine name, except it reminds me of Emeril, and no one liked the idea of naming her Emerald LeCatsy.
***
Decent writing day: just under 1300 words. It’s another battle sequence, which never fails to amaze me because I don’t know squat about the military. At my father’s suggestion, I read Audie Murphy’s book — well, I read about half of it. Got bored. My next big idea was to buy the PC game Call of Duty. I might not be a veteran (thinks I) but if I finish Call of Duty, I’ll have some sense of what war is like, right? But I only finished a third of it. Got bored.
I can only pray that my readers will be forgiving. I’m no Joe Haldeman, that’s for sure. I’m looking forward to getting John Scalzi’s book from Amazon (Old Man’s War)to see how he handles his battle sequences.
Only one battle sequence left in the novel, and this last one will be a corker. It’s unconventional enough that I should be able to get by on imagination alone.
D.