An Anxious Critter Keeper

I love critters of all shapes and sizes! This is where I keep photos of the ones in my house- I promise it's not just spiders.

[anxiouscritterkeeper]

Offered my ants some protein jelly after their long winter sleep. They gobbled it right up!

This is my golden tail sugar ant colony :)

[anxiouscritterkeeper]

Welcome to my newest invertebrate children!

I present to you to tiniest little baby Giant Bark Jumping Spider, and at least 2 Dwarf White Isopods!

It was a bit of a circus to collect these guys after they got temporarily misplaced at the post office and I had to enlist two arachnophobic post office workers to track them down. It was a good 15 minute ordeal and required me to remove a wild spider from their path at one point 😂

I've done up their new enclosures and eventually the bark baby will move into the terrarium with the isopods, when it's grown big enough not to get lost. For now it's in Dora's old enclosure.

[foxsnails]

Getting around to Kofi requests today, here's a Peppered Cory for kaijubrains !! (Gonna make a digital colour version of this fella at a later date)

I used to have a tank of these years ago and they're so so cute, I love cory cats

[paleopillbug]

Porcellio Scaber on a lotus seed pod.

They're as wonderfully difficult to photograph as they are pretty.

[buzzrds]

here's my wonderful isopod child, handcrafted in leather

[anxiouscritterkeeper]

Found this angry lil fella at my backdoor the other day.

It's an idiosoma sp, which is a family of armoured trapdoor spider. We got our first substantial bout of rain in drough-stricken South Australia over the weekend and when that happens after long dry periods, these poor guys get flooded out of their holes and make for the nearest structure for shelter, which happened to be my house.

They're absolutely not used to walking around above ground and are pitifully graceless- when I gently moved this one inside for identification photos it responded by flailing its limbs wildly until it fell over, multiple times. If nothing else, coming inside for a brief time gave it the chance to dry off before being released into the cover of a woodpile. Poor fella was sopping wet and sluggish when I found it, and filled with rage 😆😅

[anxiouscritterkeeper]

Isopods update

Damn, it's been a while since I've posted anything, been getting real busy lately!

I recently went away for a few weeks to house sit and left my little colony with a bunch of leaves and watering unstructions for my sister, and when I got back I found that their population has absolutely exploded! Lookit them all!

These are my powder blues (porcellionides pruinosus) but I knew they had some orange genes in there somewhere, which are really coming through :)

I also got the chance to collect some moss while away so I renovated their enclosure. It looks much nicer now and the springtails at least are loving it. I'll be adding some more cover once the moss settles in properly too.

[anxiouscritterkeeper]

Confetti is finally a mature spider!

He went into his second shed since I got him and came out a completely different colour :)

Mature male superb jumping spider (sandalodes superbus)

[livingadagio]

This is definitely old news to people who raise them as pets but for the rest of you who don't do that, like myself

Did you know that pill bugs... have pouches? Like... brood pouches. That their eggs and then teeny tiny little babies grow in. Called marsupium.

Yeah. Roly-polies. These guys.

Have abdominal brood "pouches". These little "bugs." (They are not actually bugs, as in insects, btw. They are terrestrial crustaceans.) Baby holding pouches.

In fact, that's just an isopod thing in general apparently? (I must admit I did not know much about isopods before I fell down this rabbit hole.)

Pouches.

That they carry their eggs in and then hold their babies in until they're ready to be born and moult for the first time.

lil baby pill bug pouches ♥

SO

TEENY

TINY

AHHHH little itty bitty babiesssss ♥

I don't know why this blew my mind so much, but it did. Hopefully someone else who sees this post enjoys learning this fact as much as I enjoyed learning it.

(Credit for that marsupium close up pic)

[lovdecay]

bugposting !! I love isopods of all kinds !!!!

[gloom-bugg]

🍂Hemlock my ghost mantis 🍂

[critterconundrum]

I recently got back from trip and came home to find that Marble had molted! She's an adult now, and I've started my search for a few males to pair her with :3

If you're in the EU and have any adult or subadult male Hymenopus coronatus for sale (or trade), lmk!

[keeskiwi]

Found a jerusalem cricket in my yard a few weeks ago and I have not been able to stop thinking about it. Have some sketchies.

[anxiouscritterkeeper]

This is my newest spider child- Confetti! Who is a young Superb Jumping spider, aka sandalodes superbus. Too young to tell gender yet.

[anxiouscritterkeeper]

Some spider photos/updates

First off, Plexi passed away last week. This little guy was about a year old which is about his expected life span. He'd been slowing down and acting kinda sluggish over the last month so I expected it. He had a good life 🙂

I have some cute photos of Dora's latest exploration session. Some days she's really curious and just wants to come out for a run around on my computer desk.

[schadhauser]

drawn traditionally in ink 🐛 but they kind of look digital here, that's neat!

[hazerl]

Another Psyllobora species to add to the list -- P. nigrovittata! These three are already off to their new homes but I'm not opposed to making more if there's a lot of interest. In the meantime, there are plenty of other Psyllobora in the sea!

Banana for scale.