Howdy y'all! Jess here. We've been wanting to start an informal blog on our website for a little while but simply haven't had the time 'til now. In our future blogs, we will be posting anything and everything we want to share with you. Weekly news, teasers, sales, guides, research - all of it. We're still figuring out exactly how to do these properly so cut us some slack here in the beginning! :)
Last Saturday, Feb 4th was the Midwest Expos Greater Toledo Reptile Extravaganza! We had a great time meeting new friends and visiting old friends, making trades, networking, and debuting our newest business cards that feature all of our social media icons and our net-caster logo. We'll be back next month!
Sunday night, I had the urge to check on some of our adult female arboreal species that we hadn't seen in a few weeks. We have this neat little portable endoscope that we can use to check on our spiders with very minimal disturbance. Many of our paired females (P. vittata, P. sp. Sabah Blue, and M. balfouri to name a few) look to be ovulating! We found that our subadult P. tigrinawesseli actually laid a phantom egg sac as well! We will leave her completely alone other than to provide heavy misting every few days until she discards or eats the sac as is typical of infertile egg sacs.
An endoscope image of an egg sac made by our female H. devamatha.
We're currently working on a detailed guide to researching natural history and hope to publish that in a blog post later this week. As always, reach out to us at marshallarachnids@gmail.com with any questions, concerns, etc, or drop a comment below!
Catch ya later :)