Below the fold.

I had to do spider cage cleanup today, like a good little Igor. Last week, they’d all been fed mealworms, which they promptly attacked and consumed, so today I was cleaning up corpses. Here’s a stack of dead mealworms to ruin your appetite.

Adults pretty much suck the bodies dry, but these are juveniles I’m feeding, and most of them can’t eat a whole mealworm…but they can kill them just fine, fill their bodies with venom, and slurp out a good meal or two out of them. Then I have to come along and clean up the charnel house. Now I know how a vampire familiar must feel.

On the right side, you might think that’s a dead spider. It’s not. They’ve been molting aggressively, thanks to this heavy diet.

The tally among the juveniles today was:

1 dead (it happens; this is a very low number for juvenile mortality)

21 molted

11 haven’t molted yet

4 were promoted from the baby vials to the juvenile boxes (when they look large enough to handle bigger prey, I move them from the vials, where they get fruit flies twice a week, to the bigger containers where they get weekly mealworms)

At this rate, I’ll have enough Latrodectus to start doing experiments by Christmas.

I haven’t even mentioned all the Steatoda and Parasteatoda I’ve got growing.