Cricket on speed

[meridannight]

I just gotta tell this story...

I was feeding my tiny P. irminia spiderling last week. He's around 0.5'' DLS, and I'm feeding him as tiny crickets as I can source from the local pet store here. Last week I got a cricket that was just a little bit bigger than my irminia. Not just that -- that thing was hyper! It almost escaped from me before I managed to throw it in my tarantula's enclosure. But none of these things deterred my little spiderling -- this P. irminia is feisty and was not the slightest concerned with a cricket larger than he. Did I say the cricket was hyper? It ran around like it was on speed! I was honestly surprised at how fast that thing was (slower than my irimina spiderling, but still very fast for a cricket).

The tarantula tried to catch it for ca 6 times with no luck, the cricket always managed to escape him. But then, I don't exactly know how it happened, because I wasn't watching the show the whole time, at some point the cricket made the mistake of getting caught in a tight space between the enclosure wall and a tree branch and my irminia surely used the circumstances to his advantage and that's how he caught the cricket. Clever little thing. Made me proud.

Here he is with said cricket in his mouth (or maybe it's a still from a horror flick, hard to tell):

 

[Salatia]

Aww. Reminds me of when I got my H.villosella sling. Was the first I'd had where the sling vial was the best option for an enclosure. At that point I'd had both larger slings, and sub-adult jumping spiders who would run away if a fruit fly so much as looked at them. But my little villosella had a couple of days to settle, and then the second that fruit fly was above their web they flung themselves at it.

They had their last moult in their vial last week and moved into a medium sling enclosure (mostly deeper than the normal ones I use). Little cricket didn't stand a chance. Though that was easy to see coming as they didn't flinch at a dubia nymph either. I do enjoy good eaters!