Australians have all the luck

They’ve got the best spiders. Here’s an Australian broadcast about spider murder methods, full of stories about gymnastic assassins and netcasting ogres. It was making me jealous, especially given that the spiders here are all huddled under a thick blanket of snow and aren’t coming out for another four or five months.

As if that wasn’t enough, they’ve also got Christmas spiders! There are colorful spiders that are scurrying around right now called Christmas spiders or jewel spiders, and they are gorgeous. Now I want some Christmas ornaments based on these spiders for my tree. Unfortunately, if you search for “Christmas spider ornaments”, you get ornaments that look nothing like Christmas spiders. What do those look like? I’ve hidden one picture below the fold.

[Read more…]

We have many jumping spiders now

We have a couple of terraria with Bold Jumping spiders — they’re fairly large, they got big cute eyes, they’re usually active — but the biggest of our jumpers retired to a silken refugium last month. We decided to check on her and winkle her out, and discovered the sad truth.

She was dead.

She did, however, leave a legacy — a big egg sac full of squirmy baby bold jumpers. Take a look!