Some more on tarantulas

 

First of all, with my ignorance, I gave you some bad information. I said I thought this was a female. In fact, this is a male, which is shown by the black color of the inner sides of the legs. So this one is the one who, when it is mature, will go off looking for a female, which it will mate with, then die. So I would rather have had a long-lived female. But the good side is that this male is only half-grown. We recently found a wandering male run-over dead on the road, and it was twice the size of my pet.

This species, which looks so formidable, doesn't bite. You can put it on your arm and it will just walk harmlessly along it (admittedly it feels a bit weird). On the other hand, if you attack it roughly it will rapidly use its hind legs to scrape hair off its abdomen. The fine hairs (called urticating hairs) will break up into a cloud of floating bits of hair that are very irritating if they get into your eyes or nose.

When we first moved to Tucson a couple of years ago, I began photographing every spider we found in the house, and I would try to identify them later. One day I found three or four small spiders in the bathroom, all with the same marking, an abdomen split in two, black on the back half, pale on the front half. I photographed them but never found out what they were. One day I was reading something about tarantulas, and there they were, baby tarantulas, and I was sorry I had not taken clearer pictures of them, and especially sorry I did not try to raise one of them.

The mother tarantula lays its eggs inside her burrow, and keeps them there for a while. Then when she thinks the time is ripe, she opens the burrow, and the young stride out one by one and march off across the desert, evidently a wonderful scene if you have the luck to witness it. I have no idea how these got into our house and ended up in our bathroom. If I had photographed them more carefully you would see the black half of the abdomen was made up of the already fully formed urticating hairs they would use for defense

A Fuzzy New Pet

 We've been warned repeatably that our three-year-long drought is going to continue bone-dry right on through our totally failing monsoon season, and our temperature would be up in the three-digits every day. Well, it's 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon and it is 73 degrees, and this is the first time in the past three days that it has finally stopped raining. We can't go to our beautiful park for our pre-breakfast walk because water is crossing the roads and there's no way to get through. If this was the turn the weather was going to take you think we would be thrilled and relieved. The truth is we are getting fed up with the soggy gloom.

I would probably be sitting in the house getting bored if it wasn't that I had a new pet.

Now I know it seems like I only write about poisonous snakes and scorpions and never write about fuzzy and furry creatures. But I'm not always like that. We found this new, very fuzzy and furry creature, or rather, our cat found it for us, walking down the hall, and we grabbed it for our own.

This is the Desert Blond Tarantula, a symbol of the Arizona desert. Full grown, the species has a four-inch leg span. When you see them wandering the roads at night it is generally an adult male searching for a female, and mating will be his last act. He literally gives it his all. I have occasionally brought one home but they don't eat and they just die. The females live for a much longer time, but they are harder to find. You don't find them wandering. They stay home in their burrow and wait for the male to come by.

Well, I really don't know how you sex them, but I believe this a female, and better still, I think it is only half grown, So I might be able to keep this one as long as I want. (I have looked it up, and the oldest one on record lived 49 years. Maybe I better think through this; I might have to remember this one in my will.

I have kept a solefugid (another exotic arachnid) for a pet, and they are fairly easy, because they will eat meal worms. The one I had lived for about a year, which may be their life span. I have kept a few scorpions for pets, but often had trouble getting them to eat, and I have had to let them go. That's what I did with my bark scorpion. and I still miss it. Anyway, getting this one to eat was the first concern.

Heather, my daughter-in-law, went to the pet store and got me a packet of baby crickets. We poured them all into the aquarium. Now, there is another slight problem with tarantulas, and that is, they come out at night in the darkness, which can make them problematic to observe. I had about two inches of gravel in the bottom of the tank, and I had put in a square piece of bark, knowing the tarantula would want something to hide under during the day, and it has now dug out a hole beneath the piece of bark. That's where it was hiding out when we poured in the crickets. The next morning I looked in and there were only two or three crickets left. Now, did they bury themselves in the gravel? Did the tarantula eat them all in one wild gorge? If it ate them all, it was in the dark so we did not see it.

That was not very satisfying. So we went back to the pet store and bought some big half-grown crickets. The next morning I looked in, and noticed that the spider was still out from his hideaway (is it taming down?), and though we did not see it make a kill, there were scattered parts of slaughtered crickets strewn about, and there it was holding one while s/he devoured it.

 

So I would not have to turn it loose out of guilt that I was starving it. And anyway, I have just now read that their metabolism is so low that they can go months, if not years, without eating a bite.

This blog is dedicated to my good friend Carter Patteson.

Venomous Creatures

 We have recently discovered a new park which is (we can scarcely believe our good luck) an eight-minute drive from our house. It's an oasis in the midst of the desert, called Agua Caliente ("Warm Springs"). It features a chain of large and small lakes joined by walking trails, and a background of giant palm trees. Everything about it is beautiful, and ideally set up for our daily walk, and we go almost daily. Right now the days are torrid, so we get up early (5:30) and go there before breakfast when it is still cool. It never seems to be annoyingly crowded, but it certainly has a lot of people (very friendly people) out walking just as we are, though mostly they are also walking their dogs (usually very friendly dogs).

As much of the park as possible is kept untouched to attract nature. Birds and dragonflies make up a great part of the wildlife,  and we especially enjoy the soft-shelled turtles pulled up on the banks of the smaller lakes. They look sort of like pancakes with snake heads.

But the first thing you notice when you enter the park is that they have put up signs everywhere seeking to warn us that there is a serpent in this paradise, a rattlesnake.   We keep looking for them, but have never seen one here. Anyone who reads this blog very often knows we don't dread the rattlesnakes that we have at our own home, and some of you might think we are already overly fond of them.

And this brings me to what I want to write about. I guess many or most people don't like snakes at all. But if, like me, you have always liked snakes, and kept them for pets, and so on, then ordinary snakes are fine, but venomous snakes stand out and are always the ones you are most interested in. They somehow seem superior. Maybe it  is because they are potentially dangerous, maybe because you have to keep your eye on them. It is a sort of respect. If you decide to keep a venomous snake (and I confess I never did) then it means you have moved up into the big leagues. I was thinking about that recently when I was looking at some photographs of snakes I took when we lived in Arkansas. They are almost entirely of venomous species. There was simply more variety in Arkansas , and you were more likely to encounter them every time you went out in the wilds. Probably it's because there is so much more water in Arkansas than there is here, paths through parks and game department territory usually following streams, and snakes are to be found associated with water, and the snakes you see most often are cottonmouths.

Sometimes in the shadows of a swamp a white mouth will fall open, and that is the cottonmouth's warning not to come closer, as surely as a rattlesnake's rattle.

Here is a story about cottonmouths that may be true or may be a myth: When they are small, recently born, they have the tip of the tail yellow. What we are told is that they dangle this yellow tip and jiggle it. A lizard sees that and thinks it is some small creature it can eat, and pounces on it, thus bringing itself close enough for the cottonmouth to strike it and catch it for its own meal. Here is a young snake still with a bit of yellow on the tail tip.

 I have the clearest recollection that I actually saw one wriggling its tail trying to attract a lizard, but now, since I didn't photograph it, I  can no longer be sure I saw it, and thus I have lost the fame that might have come with proving the myth. Alas, and my memory isn't getting any better.

Another very common venomous snake, often virtually invisible in a pile of rotten wood from a fallen tree, is the copperhead.

But this species isn't treated with as much respect as the others. A country doctor (in a place where people do get bitten from time to time) once told me he didn't treat copperhead bites at all, except to give the victim something to calm him down. Hmm. I think I might go to someone else.

Driving on dirt roads in game department land, we sometimes would see a timber snake sunning on the road. We didn't trust the next  person coming by to go out of his way to avoid squashing it, so we always stopped and got a long stick and tried to chase it off the road. Something we learned in this way is that these large snakes have a very mild temper. No matter how we wrestled them around they never rattled or showed any emotion except for surprise that we were treating them so rudely.

And finally there's this little snake, the western pigmy rattlesnake. I don't know much about it, except that it is tiny.

There is this feeling that here in the desert southwest is where the variety is to be found. But here in Tucson we only ever see Western Diamondbacks, at least that's the case here in our backyard. On the other hand, Western Diamondbacks are my favorite snakes, and frankly I think it could eat all the others for breakfast.