I’m home alone, and in addition to taking care of the evil cat, I have a mealworm colony in the dining room. Mary set it up and usually feeds them — it’s not a big deal, just throw a slice of apple in there every once in a while — and I just scoop up a handful every few weeks to feed the spiders.
We do not have 10,000 mealworms. I’d have to be raising a thousand spiders for that to make sense. But I can dream!
(We do not have guests over for dining now…pandemic, you know. If we did, we might move the colony to another room, even though they are quite quiet and well-behaved.)
Do you have to also scoop mealworm poop every now and then?
Aren’t you conditioning your spiders to only eat mealworms?
They are on a fine mesh above a box. The frass falls through and we just dump out the box.
The spiders get fruit flies, mainly, and an occasional mealworm or waxworm. When they get a big bigger, human flesh.
Even mealworms don’t seem partial to broccoli.
Anyway, the dining room is the perfect place for your colony. If you ever do have guests you can offer them a lovely plate of fresh Klingon gagh. I daresay it would only add to your reputation as the small-town spider-breeding professor.
Hi komarov, fellow Star Trek fan!
Klingon gagh was exactly what came to my mind when I saw the picture of PZ’s mealworms!
PZ Myers @ # 3: The frass falls through and we just dump out the box.
Frass – very underused word, that. I suggest we all start applying it to a certain “News Network”, for starters.
For extra Science Points™, frassify half of each garden row and measure the difference in yield from both sides.