Anthologies of Keric the Arachnid pt. 5 ~ Getting to know each other

Hey ya'll 

when someone talks about getting a pet spider, well... I'll be honest, it's really not all as exciting as it sounds. Take Keric, for example, for pretty much all of the day he just sits there. In the evening, he might stretch out his eight legs for a bit, maybe take a stroll around the container, and then he returns to his usual spot. Sitting, legs curled up like the fingers of a pianist. Occasionally, and this is only once every 4 days or so, his usual routine would be interrupted by feeding time, the "excitement" of which simply consists me dropping a beheaded worm into his cage and him taking his own sweet time to devour it. The longest so far is still the first feeding which took the better part of 12-13 hours! Having said all that, however, Keric is extremely endearing when he wants to be. For instance there was a particular day this week that he seemed particularly restless and so, I went out on a limb and took a big step by allowing him to explore the contours of my palm. I'll admit, it was not as nerve wracking as I thought it might be (I have this fear that I will squash him by accident) and I found that once the both of us were used to it, he could sit there contentedly for hours, licking his legs and then using them to groom the little brown hairs that cover the rest of his body. 

One thing though, there's still much I have to learn about this particular species. Their molting cycles for instance, and the appropriate levels of humidity. Right now I'm pretty much experimenting and taking note of any changes in behavior... but still these things can be so unreliable sometimes. Take 2 days ago, for instance. I thought Keric was about to molt as he was less active than usual (no nightly stroll around his cage). Also he was spinning webs in a particular corner of the cage and refusing any number of beheaded worms I offered to him. Surely he was about to molt! But I suppose this wasn't so because the very night I decided to experimentally offer him one more worm... well, he ate it! With much gusto! Pretty soon after this, the nightly excursions resumed as usual. If you consider my previous post about long-lived invertebrates and how their lifespans give me a chance to really try to understand their behavior, I suppose we can be thankful that Keric's species generally have incredibly long lifespans (I hear females live for up to 20 years * I HOPE KERIC TURNS OUT TO BE A LADY!!!) because that simply means we will have a long time to get to know each other. 

Keric's feeding on the 1st of March 2012.

The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout. 

Down came the rain and washed the spider out!

Cheers,
Cyren