RIP, Cheezit
My pet tarantula Cheezit is dead. I'm not sure when she died, but it was sometime in the last few days.
I'd known something was wrong... she'd put down a thick layer of webbing all over the bottom of her habitat and up the sides of the walls, and then just sat there. Normally that's not wierd behavior, but her pose was wrong -- she had her legs kinda curled up against her body.
I dropped a couple of crickets in there, but she totally ignored them; after three days I took them out. And she gradually ended up in the very corner of her habitat, wedged down into the corner in a kind of "pit" dug out of the substrate and coated with a layer of webbing. And then she just sat there, unmoving. Her legs just curled more and more up around her body, which is not the body posture of a normal healthy tarantula.
Last night I noticed she was looking a little "deflated," like an old balloon with a slow leak. So I got the long forceps (I used them to remove cricket parts, or digested cricket remains, etc.) and gently prodded her legs, lifting them up slightly, that sort of thing. Totally limp, no movement whatsoever.
Alas, Cheezit was no more.
As for the curled-up position, according to my tarantula book, this is what dead tarantulas look like -- they pretty much just curl up and die.
I don't know why she died.... It might have been age -- I have no idea how old she really was. Heck, for all I know, "she" was really a "he" -- in which case, death of old age isn't all that strange. Males live only one-and-a-half to three years after reaching maturity, after all, and Cheezit was a good-sized spider -- bigger than my adult G. rosea, at any rate. S/he didn't have tibial hooks, but there are species that don't; maybe Pterrors are one of them? I'm researching that now. His/her forelegs didn't look terribly long, but I've never seen pictures or live versions of a male & a female Pterror together, so I've not had any real basis for comparison.
Ah well... sigh....
In Memoriam
********************
EDIT: According to my tarantula e-list, mature male Pterrors do in fact have tibial spurs. So, Cheezit was a female, after all.
Well, maybe her previous owner had had her for a long time (I'd gotten her with her complete terrarium setup at a local pet store for only $25, last year; the terrarium had Spiderman stickers on it, so it was obviously some kid's now-unwanted pet). Or, perhaps she was wild-caught... I hadn't thought of that before. If that's the case, who knows how old she was at the beginning of her pet-hood....
Ah, well.
I'd known something was wrong... she'd put down a thick layer of webbing all over the bottom of her habitat and up the sides of the walls, and then just sat there. Normally that's not wierd behavior, but her pose was wrong -- she had her legs kinda curled up against her body.
I dropped a couple of crickets in there, but she totally ignored them; after three days I took them out. And she gradually ended up in the very corner of her habitat, wedged down into the corner in a kind of "pit" dug out of the substrate and coated with a layer of webbing. And then she just sat there, unmoving. Her legs just curled more and more up around her body, which is not the body posture of a normal healthy tarantula.
Last night I noticed she was looking a little "deflated," like an old balloon with a slow leak. So I got the long forceps (I used them to remove cricket parts, or digested cricket remains, etc.) and gently prodded her legs, lifting them up slightly, that sort of thing. Totally limp, no movement whatsoever.
Alas, Cheezit was no more.
As for the curled-up position, according to my tarantula book, this is what dead tarantulas look like -- they pretty much just curl up and die.
I don't know why she died.... It might have been age -- I have no idea how old she really was. Heck, for all I know, "she" was really a "he" -- in which case, death of old age isn't all that strange. Males live only one-and-a-half to three years after reaching maturity, after all, and Cheezit was a good-sized spider -- bigger than my adult G. rosea, at any rate. S/he didn't have tibial hooks, but there are species that don't; maybe Pterrors are one of them? I'm researching that now. His/her forelegs didn't look terribly long, but I've never seen pictures or live versions of a male & a female Pterror together, so I've not had any real basis for comparison.
Ah well... sigh....
In Memoriam
********************
EDIT: According to my tarantula e-list, mature male Pterrors do in fact have tibial spurs. So, Cheezit was a female, after all.
Well, maybe her previous owner had had her for a long time (I'd gotten her with her complete terrarium setup at a local pet store for only $25, last year; the terrarium had Spiderman stickers on it, so it was obviously some kid's now-unwanted pet). Or, perhaps she was wild-caught... I hadn't thought of that before. If that's the case, who knows how old she was at the beginning of her pet-hood....
Ah, well.