Pseudoscorpion followup

A few interesting points I came across:

A) Reproduction is almost identical to Amblypygids

B) They mature at 4th instar

C) Mine is at least a year old (adult)

D) Mine isn't terribly old because it's still agile enough to climb smooth surfaces without a problem

E) I'll probably get a couple years out of this guy (longevity is 3-4 years after maturity)

Pseudoscorpion

Some days, I just love my job . . . 'cause look what one of my colleagues found trying to escape from a tub of hazelnut orchard debris:


For an idea of size, the deli cup he's in has a diameter of about an inch. I haven't officially measured him (her? how do you sex these things?) but he's probably around 5mm. Pretty good-sized, actually.

It would be kinda cool if it were a gravid female, but then I'd have to find something as small as mites to feed the young.

Based on a few pictures I turned up, I'm guessing it's Chelifer cancroides, but I have no means of confirming that.

Latrodectus geometricus producing an egg sac

The title says it all. I apologize for the video quality, but despite having an awesome DSLR for still photos, the only video device I have is my cellphone.



(In case the embed isn't working, you can find the video here on YouTube as well.)

Unfortunately, this isn't the specimen that I want to start producing sacs. This is the dark-morph I got from a friend in Georgia -- the same one whose hatched sac I posted photos of yesterday. Oh, and those slings plumped up considerably after they finished their cockroach.

Centruroides vittatus, widow spiders, centipedes, and a vertebrate

This is the female Centruroides vittatus that I mentioned may have absorbed her embryos. She's finishing off a cockroach in these pictures that she eagerly seized and immediately stung earlier today. She's fattened up considerably in the past couple days and I'm hoping the food and boosted warmth and humidity will help her kick-start some fresh embryos.


My two pairs of Latrodectus hesperus have been cohabiting for almost a week now and neither male has been eaten. Hopefully I'll get some sacs from these girls soon.

I tried getting a shot of the other pair but it didn't turn out -- same with my mated L. geometricus. She's gotten VERY fat and still hasn't produced any sacs yet. Luckily, my other female's sac hatched recently:

I haven't closely examined those two photos, but I estimated by looking at the slings themselves that there's around 80.

Now for a few critters I haven't posted about yet. Here are my two centipedes; the first is an immature Scolopendra subspinipes that I bought as a pling (pedeling) in October 2006. This is the only species of centipede that has a human death attributed to its venom.

This next one is an Ethmostigmus trigonopodus that I bought in May of 2007. I have no idea if it's full-grown (it's a good 2"-3").


And finally, a vertebrate. This is my fiancee's blue-tongued skink. He was hanging out near the side of his enclosure instead of freaking out and hiding, so I thought I'd take a couple pictures.

Good news, bad news

Bad news: the last of my Centruroides margaritatus died. It was almost ready to molt to 5th instar, I think. There goes that community idea. This leaves me with six communal species, assuming I can get my C. vittatus to re-produce that brood she was carrying. She eagerly fed today, so that's a good sign.

Good news: my second Latrodectus geometricus sac hatched the other day. I estimate at least 80 slings. I'll try to post pictures tonight or this weekend. (The first sac from this particular female was a dud.)

The female I mated still hasn't produced any sacs for me. My L. hesperus pairs are still cohabiting after nearly a week, though.

Minor updates

Yesterday I finally received a large quantity of plastic 40-dram vials that I'd been waiting on for quite some time. I took it as an opportunity to rehouse all my juvenile scorpions along with a few other critters. While doing so, I noticed:

-- Some of my T. stigmurus are getting pudgy, but none have molted yet
-- Eight of my remaining U. mordax from July's brood are now 3rd instar
-- One of my juvenile WC U. mordax is either 3I or 4I (it's bigger than my brood's 3Is but not by much)
-- My H. judaicus are all still 2I (I can't quite replicate Jordan's temperatures in my current setup) but have been putting on weight and may molt soon
-- My C. margaritatus is getting fatter (I believe it to currently be 4I)
-- My C. vittatus may have absorbed her embryos (I received a few tips on how to get her to regenerate them from a fellow hobbyist; if I don't have any luck he can find me another)
-- One of my S. grossa dropped a fifth eggsac:
--- sac #1's survivor is growing and doing well
--- sac #2 has one large survivor and one tiny survivor
--- sac #3 has a handful of survivors
--- sac #4 is mostly still there
--- I suspect that these don't cannibalize as much as true widows; there's lots of dead slings at the bottom that don't look like food boluses
-- My first L. geometricus eggsac was infertile, the second looks ready to explode with slings
-- The L. geometricus I mated still has not produced any sacs
-- Same for the L. hesperus I mated

I didn't really feel like dealing with my two male L. hesperus, so I put them in with my females -- the larger one with the female he mated with earlier, the smaller one with my virgin female.

Completely unrelated to bugs

My visitor map tells me I have a reader from just outside of Kladno (Libušín) in the Czech Republic. (I've also seen a reader or two in Prague.) My dad was born in Prague and grew up in Kladno.

Dobrý den!

By the way, if any of my readers feel like commenting on my posts . . . go for it! I'd like to hear others' thoughts on my collection and the hobby.

If anyone's a member of the forums I'm on, feel free to bring it up there as well.

Hadogenes paucidens molts to 3rd instar

A while back I received 11 second-instar Hadogenes paucidens. Unfortunately, the majority died (I've heard that this species is difficult to rear from early instars), and I was left with only two. I checked on them today and discovered that one had finally molted to third instar!

This species is very slow-growing, so I'd been waiting quite a while on it.

Here's the pudgy sibling that I'm still waiting on:

Minor spider updates and observations

One of my two false-widows (Steatoda grossa) laid her fourth eggsac that I found today.

There was a huge gap between her first and second sacs. Then the third came before I even removed the second from her enclosure. Now that they've hatched out, there's a fourth.

The juvies in sacs numbers two and three are tag-teaming the two juvenile crickets I put in with each.

The one survivor from the first sac plumped up after having one this morning.

My sac-bearing Latrodectus geometricus attacked an old food bolus instead of the cricket I offered her today. Strange.

I'm feeding my four virgin L. hesperus today (two males, two females) and I'm going to try mating them over the weekend.

I fed my mated L. geometricus a good-sized cricket today. She plumped up considerably. I hope she starts dropping sacs soon (she's a pale morph, compared to the dark one that's already given me one sac).

Thought I'd share.

Cheers

Ultra-short U. mordax update

Four of the five I gave away have now been confirmed as dead.

Roughly half of the ten that I kept have now molted to third instar.

U. mordax molt to 3I, new T. stigmurus

The first Uroctonus mordax from July's brood molted to third instar this week. The molt went from Monday night into Tuesday morning, and these photos were taken on Saturday. This is at an age of approximately three months.


Apparently one of the five I gave away molted the same night but didn't survive -- after speaking with the owner it seems conditions may have been too dry. Three of the five I gave away have now died; the other two I haven't heard about since passing them on to other hobbyists.

A couple of the others look almost ready to molt as well. One or two don't look anywhere near it and don't seem very interested in prey.

In other news, I recently got five third-instar Tityus stigmurus from a friend of mine in Texas. These guys are parthenogenetic and communal as adults, so I shouldn't have any problem getting a community up and running.

Community Ambitions

As stated before, I eventually want to have large display tanks for my communal species. Yesterday I was thinking of what sort of a goal I had in mind, and I came up with something along these lines:


The dimensions I came up with arbitrarily put the two left tanks at 6' x 2' -- if they have square cross-sections, then around 150 gallons!

Clockwise from upper left: H. longimanus, C. margaritatus, T. stigmurus, C. vittatus, H. judaicus, U. mordax, and P. imperator. The whole display would be about 12 feet long by 4 feet high. I'd have to spend a lot of money for a system where I could slide the tanks out to work on each one, especially because false bottoms will make the two on the left VERY heavy.

Each tank has a background photo from the country the species is native to (in the case of the US species, from a specific area they're found in).

Each will also be labeled:


Underneath the tanks would be a good place to keep feeders (cockroaches). I would probably also have a basic shelving system like I do now to keep the juveniles on (most of these species are communal only as adults).

I was discussing this with my fiancee -- to keep things even I'd want install a similar system for her tarantulas. :-D

Now we just have to get a house and I have to get a real job . . .

Miscellaneous Updates

I figure it's about time for a few random updates since I haven't posted in nearly a month, so here they are.

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I've been trying to downsize my collection a bit, mainly so I could focus on keeping communal species -- I'd rather have a large pile of deli cups if I know that the inhabitants can eventually be housed together. My current collection (scorpions only) has been reduced to:

0.1.0 Centruroides hentzi
0.0.1 Centruroides margaritatus
0.1.0 Centruroides vittatus
0.0.2 Hadogenes paucidens
0.1.0 Hadrurus arizonensis
0.1.8 Heterometrus longimanus
0.0.5 Hottentotta judaicus
0.0.4 Pandinus imperator
0.5.0 Tityus stigmurus
1.4.12 Uroctonus mordax
0.0.1 Vaejovis spinigerus

The only species on that list that aren't communal are the H. paucidens, V. spinigerus, and H. arizonensis. I plan on passing those onto other hobbyists soon. The C. hentzi is an adult female that I've had for over a year so I'm not thinking of breeding her again -- I may just keep her til she expires rather than giving her to someone without knowing her age. The C. margaritatus I've decided to keep until adulthood in the hopes of finding a mate (this is the bicolor morph which is very pretty, and I would love to have a community of them).

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Last week I was stopping by the lab I used to work in, and as luck would have it, the woman who spotted the U. mordax that birthed this summer found another one! On the floor of a classroom she was in, no less.

I have no idea how, but a third-instar U. mordax somehow made its way into one of the buildings at OSU. The habitat for this species has to be at least ten miles away. I asked an entomologist in the building if he knew anything about it, and the closest answer he could think of was an escapee from a soil litter sample somewhere in the building.

It sure worked out well for me, though!

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The same day as the arrival of the renegade U. mordax, I got a package from a friend of mine in Texas -- five third-instar Tityus stigmurus. This is a beautiful orange and black species native to Brazil that happens to be parthenogenic (for those of you who don't know, that means it's capable of reproducing asexually; a mature female will simply give birth to little clones of herself). Hopefully this will be the easiest community I've ever attempted.

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Last night I was checking on my second instar U. mordax and noticed one in kind of a funny pose. My thought, since it wasn't moving but clearly wasn't in the "dead" pose, was that it was preparing to molt. Later that night a friend of mine to whom I gave one of the other 2I said hers was molting -- after double-checking on mine, I saw the same thing!

None of my other nine from this brood have molted yet, so hopefully they will soon. Some look like they're still to skinny (I hope they begin to feed more). Oh, and I found out another one of the five that I gave away died.

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A couple weekends ago I was checking on my U. mordax community and lifted a rock where there had previously been one adult and one subadult female -- now, there was one adult female and half of one subadult female.

I took the larger female out in case she may have been gravid (gravid females are known to be less communal across a lot of species). It was dissapointing to see my collection shrink, but as the saying goes, "all scorpions are communal until they aren't."

I thought it may have been due to the size discrepancy, but within a few days my male and the other subadult female had occupied the same hide under the rock. Also, I saw one in the corner when I went to mist, and discovered it was sitting on top of a tankmate. Perhaps I just had a grouchy female.

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The same female mentioned in the above minipost was taken on a community outreach and gave me my first sting experience with this species. I was a little disappointed at how weak it was -- it barely went beyond "dry sting" status, and that's only because I felt a little tingling after the fact.

If you're wondering, I was attempting to scootch the female off of my hand and onto a student's at the outreach, and she flicked her tail back at me. I felt her stinger connect (like brushing your finger against a pin) but felt no pain -- just a slight tingling a minute later. I figure it was somethign akin to a scorpion "warning shot." I used it as a chance to explain to the students how harmless this species was even if it does decide to sting.

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And finally, a non-scorpion post.

A friend of mine from Georgia was able to pick up a few brown widows the last time she visited home and told me she had a male if I was interested. I initially had two males; one got eaten by a female and one was more or less a runt that just died.

I picked up a male and female from my friend (they were cohabiting, so I figured that was a good sign) on Thursday night last week (I write this on Tuesday morning). Friday night I introduced him to my only female. There was much web-dancing and moving about the tank, as well as some movement by the female, but I eventually grew bored and left them alone. I returned later and saw the male in position, and could clearly see the reproductive structure unwound from his pedipalp and in the female's ventral opening (forgive my lack of knowledge with spider anatomy).

Shortly after I arrived they separated and the male backed off from the female -- I assumed I disturbed them and he would now be eaten. However, when I checked back in 12 hours, they were mating again! As of last night they were still successfully cohabiting.

I figure I can leave the male in there, as he's been with all the females in my posession and has no further use for me. If he gets eaten, that's too bad; if he stays alive, that's an good example countering the "widow" status of his partner (though she did eat the first male I offered her).

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Hopefully soon I'll be able to post pictures of the new T. stigmurus as well as the freshly-molted U. mordax.

V. spinigerus stillborns

I've been waiting on one of my female Vaejovis spinigerus to birth since spring. This past Sunday (I write this on Friday, and the following pictures were taken on Thursday evening) I saw her in the "birth basket" stance, so I assumed she was going to give birth shortly. Then, nothing happened. Nothing happened for the next four days, either. Then on Thursday evening, I checked on her and saw she had a large white glob of something in one of her pinchers (she dropped it when I got the camera).


Yep, that's a cluster of stillborn scorpion embryos.


I have no idea how this happened or what caused it, but I have one thing to say about it:


I may email Kari McWest and see if he has anything to say on the matter.

U. mordax Community

Yet another post about my favorite scorpion . . .

I finally reached one of my scorpion goals by setting up a community of this species: one male and five females collected in different areas of Oregon. The male and two of the females were those featured in this post, one female is the one featured in this post, one was the largest featured in this post, and the final female was collected in Eugene in 2007.

Here is the tank in its entirety:

Here's that stone on the right side at a different angle, to show one of the hides I provided:

I believe this is the female caught on Cougar Reservoir and the female that had a brood this summer:

And here is the male and one of the females caught on the same night:

The two others were hiding somewhere that I couldn't access as easily.

I believe the two most-recently caught females may be gravid, so I could have some more broods on my hands before long.

And just for fun, here's a map (looking east) of where these specimens came from:

Mordax not communal at 2I . . .

So I saw a couple more little corpses when I checked this morning (), and decided to separate them this evening. I only found nine.

+ 26 in original brood
- 5 given to friends
- 4 unknown deaths (that number doesn't bother me so much)
- 9 recovered
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= 8 cannibalized

I guess that isn't too bad, but a 50/50 survival/cannibalism rate still kinda sucks. My H. longimanus only had 20% cannibalism.

So I think I'll be separating my next broods.

(I've been leaning towards specializing in this species and downsizing my collection a bit, so this is a handy piece of information to know for my two other gravid females.)

Successful U. mordax Hunt

(Pardon the photo quality in advance -- we were using my friend's point-and-shoot, which as I'm sure you know, wouldn't work too well in the dark.)

After one pathetic attempt (one female) and one completely fruitless attempt, I went back to Botkin Road with a friend of mine in the hopes of finding some U. mordax. It seems we did it right this time -- the right spot at night (as opposed to the wrong spot at night, or the right spot in the day).

The first spot we found anything at was on an exposed hill that would have been in the sun a few hours earlier. We found one female and one male underneath some pieces of plywood laying on the dirt.

BL pic of one of them:
The male:
They were found on the portion of the hill below the road -- looking above the road didn't turn anything up. We went up the road about another 1/4 mile to another exposed area. The soil on the hills here is really REALLY loose, and so we found nothing checking the second hill, either. We were about to give up when we blacklit under a rock that was laying on some more stable soil on the hill.

Two second instars! They were found within six inches of each other. I would have loved to get a pic of the both of them, but one ran away before we could get the camera. Here's a couple shots of the other one:

We let those two go. The guy I was with thought he heard something, so we did a sweep of the hill with our lights before heading back to his truck. I swept my blacklight across the hill and something green caught my eye. It was another female about ten feet from me! We scrambled up the hill and easily scooped her into the cup that we photographed the little one in and decided to call it a night.

A few pics from when we got back . . .

Tyler's first handling experience:

The male / female from underneath the plywood:
The second female:

Gravid Centruroides vittatus

While doing the rounds this afternoon, I noticed that the female Centruroides vittatus I brought back from Sanderson, Texas was in an unusual pose. (She's the one I never got around to photographing when I got home.)

For those of you unfamiliar to scorpions, those little white globes you can see through the tergites are scorpion embryos, meaning she's going to have babies in the near future.

Closeup:
You can also see a touch of mycosis on the left pectine -- I hope that it doesn't kill her before the babies molt to second instar.

I honestly didn't believe that this female was gravid when I first got her. The T.I.T.T.I.E.S. member who found and collected her thought she may be based on the fact that the vast majority of wild-caught females are. I was doubtful because she was so skinny when we found her (and had a voracious appetite when I got home), and we found a juvenile of this species elsewhere on the trip. Everything I saw was telling me she had just had her brood.

Shows what I know, huh?

Uroctonus mordax Breeding Report

In April 2008, I was presented with a female Uroctonus mordax that was caught 14 miles west of Corvallis, Oregon.

The female on April 10:

As time progressed, she was observed to have grown larger, and she was suspected to be gravid. Possible embryos were observed through her membrane between the tergites and sternites. She was checked on in early July and had not yet undergone partuition.

On the afternoon July 13, 2008, the female was found with a brood of first-instar scorplings on her back.

Brood size at this time was estimated at greater than 16 scorplings. Humidity was raised and the female was left undisturbed to avoid stress that may lead to cannibalism.

The scorpions were checked on periodically throughout the next week by holding a flashlight to the side of the enclosure and looking through gaps between the piece of cork they were hiding under and the substrate. As all that was seen was a pile of white scorplings, the cork was not removed.

On the evening of July 23, 2008, a similar check raised suspicions that the young appeared too well-developed to still be first-instar (though they were still very white). The cork was removed for a brief photography opportunity.

These photographs revealed that the young had indeed begun to molt into second-instar. Because they were still so pale, it was assumed that this had happened very recently and they had not yet started to darken (wild observations found dark specimens believed to be second-instar, though it is possible they were third).

Another check on the morning of July 26th showed only slight darkening, but revealed that some of the young had begun to scatter from the mother's back.

The final check occurred on the evening of July 31st, 2008, and revealed that all but three of the young had left the mother (one remained on her "face," one on her pedipalp, and one was hanging on underneath). Looking at the substrate and the cork that the young were hiding on gave a final count of 26 second-instar Uroctonus mordax.

The female was removed at this point to hopefully determine the communal nature of juveniles of this species, and prey (pinhead crickets) was offered at this time. No feeding has yet been observed.

The young were found to fluoresce at this point, so it is assumed that their exoskeletons have finished sclerotization.

Basic timeline:

April 2008: female acquired
July 13: brood discovered
July 23: 2I discovered
July 26: slight darkening of young, scattering started
July 31: young completely scattered, mother removed, prey offered