Thursday 1 January 2009

Twelve huntsmen (spiders) hunting …

If the Cryptocheilus wasps bothered to fly into the house, they'd find an arachnid bonanza. The Snail Shell is home to at least a dozen young huntsman spiders. They hatched in the laundry a few days before Christmas and have now spread into the kitchen. Unlike the adults, they're active by day. They're also very skittish. If I get too close with the camera, off they scuttle.





You can get an idea of the size of these little cuties from the photos. The grouting between the laundry tiles is about 3 mm across. In the second picture, those ripples are brush strokes on the ceiling. (I'm not getting those painters back.) In a few moults, they'll be as big as my hand. (The spiders, that is, not the painters. Although that might explain the rubbish job they did on the ceiling.)

It's difficult to imagine that these growing spiders can find enough to eat in my spotless house. Oh, who am I kidding? There are plenty of creepy crawlies in the laundry. The real problem for them will be avoiding the daddy-long-legs (Pholcidae), those spindly killers lurking in the corners, waiting for hapless young arachnids to wander close by. It's a spider eat spider world.