Farns' Sugar Shack

Something I noticed

2008-09-07T13:43:00.003-05:00

Yesterday Ashley and I went to a tarantula expo and bought three new tarantulas. It's all very exciting and relevant to this blog. I wrote up a short blog blurb on it, and then I noticed that I was writing it on Ashley and my family blog. The day I write about my tarantulas on the family blog is the day we all realize that this blog, my personal blog, has been deprecated. I guess this is the last proof that there really isn't a Farns any more, just the Farnsworth family. I have been married several months now and I really haven't thought of anything I want to post on my personal blog. I just don't have anything worth writing that isn't a part of our family.

Single people are always trying to express their inner self on web pages and journals and elsewhere. I think it's because they are bitterly lonely and they know their life is pretty nearly meaningless. That's just not true of married people; at least it's not how I feel any more. I don't feel any need to express myself particularly and my life is not meaningless. I have Ashley to thank for that, and I know she is experiencing basically the same thing.

So now we have a family blog where we post announcements and just keep people updated on what it's like to be a part of our family. But we just aren't needy any more, and I don't expect us to write on our individual blogs any more either.

It's a really nice and a good thing.

So click over to my family blog and pick up there.

http://ashleyandgrant.blogspot.com

Life Changes

2008-07-20T15:04:00.005-05:00

A few posts ago I wrote about some significant changes to my life. Like I was changing my schedule to get up earlier and trying to cut down if not eliminate working from home from my life. Those were big changes, to be sure. But there are big changes, and then there are big changes.

Like getting married. Try that one if you think your life is always exciting and different. That's what I did. And it made a big difference. In just about every element of life that there is.

Like obsessing about tarantulas. Yes, since getting married I have spent the odd hour reading the forums as arachnoboards and occasionally dropping the condescending post to someone with a tarantula question. But I took Stella and stored her at my old apartment on top of a bookcase. Then I pretty much forgot about her. The nice thing about tarantulas is that you can do that and they don't mind. In fact they probably prefer it. Some day I'm sure I'll look at her again, but it might not be until after the summer, when we move back into my old place (We are staying in her studio for the moment until my roommate's contract runs out. Then we are moving back). I also left the roach colony in my room. And it's been there for quite some time with no attention. The problem with Blatta lateralis is that they have a very high metabolism. Like, they eat a lot, poop a lot, and die a lot. And I think if they run out of food they die even faster. So since I got married they have built up a couple of inches of poop, dead bodies, shed skins, and other hud in their cage. It doesn't smell that good. And they got some kind of mite infestation that's going crazy on it. A responsible owner probably would clean this out somehow and make it nice so as to perpetuate the colony. But I'm married. Who cares about stupid roaches. So I took the whole colony, enclosure and all, and put it in a garbage bag. Then I put that bag in my deep freeze, where it remains to this day. They tell me that freezing is the most humane way of killing invertibrates, because the cold slows them down and puts them to sleep before killing them. I guess a thousand or so tropical roaches just found out whether that's true or not. Some day I'll go back to that house and throw them in the dumpster (without opening the garbage bag...yuck), but for now, I'm married. Forget that other apartment.

And then there are the gerbils. I never did get around to bloggin much about them, mainly because I was trying to get some good pictures. They get really bad red eye and they also hate being flashed. Frankly the flash on the camera could be used as negative reinforcement for training purposes. I should take a picture whenever they try and poop where I don't want them to and they would stop (some of my siblings should try that on their kids maybe). Anyway you also can't take good pictures without flash because they just don't hold still and pose for you very well. So you get no good pictures. Anyway, I was going to blog about them and mention how much I love them and how happy I am to have purchased these endearing little rodents. They were my friends through a lot of lonely days and we really had some quality time together. But now I'm married. So they can go get into mousetraps for all I care. And they have. Actually it was sticky traps so they are still alive and I put them back into their cage. But they did go like two or three months without a cage cleaning. They were living in piles of their own filth and becoming as ferrel as little gerbils in a cage can be. I worried they were not getting enough food because I was never feeding them so I dumped handfuls of grub in there, which made them fat. They probably have diabetes. When I saw them last I was surprised how much more calm they are than they ever were. Perhaps they have grown up. Perhaps being stored in a freaking hot room all the time with nothing to do but poo on themselves has affected their personality. Or perhaps the problem is that they are waddling around pushing their fat bellies up and down the tubes that connect their various tanks. Frankly, I don't know what's wrong with them, if anything. And I'm not so sure I care. Because I'm married!

Here's a picture of me feeding Remus (sans redeye...thanks to the gimp) in the days when I used to love and care about these guys. Anyone want a pair of well behaved, calm gerbils?

Yes married life has brought changes. Lots of changes. And quite frankly, all of them are good. I can't think of a single exception. People who say being married is hard are completely making it up, from what I can tell. I think they say that to keep you from getting married rashly. Well it's a big lie. Marriage is awesome. It's so awesome that it takes everything you used to care about and throws it in the trash can. And you are left feeling nothing but gratitude and satisfaction.

Oh and you should read our family blog. We write there more frequently than we do our individual blogs. http://ashleyandgrant.blogspot.com.

A Movie for a Rainy Day

2008-06-12T00:01:00.013-05:00

I bet just about everyone has a movie that really speaks to them. When it's rainy outside or cloudy in, there are just certain movies that we want to sit down with and lose ourselves in. It's tempting to think that under those circumstances people would choose to watch funny, cheerful movies that get them out of whatever funk they are in. From what I have seen, though, it's not the case. People watch movies that they relate to, that are a microcosm of some critical element of their life. I remember growing up that my dad watched "Groundhog Day" and "Sabrina" all that time. I mean, all the time. Those movies spoke to him. They were about some single guy who really wasn't very happy or fulfilled in his life until he was transformed by a woman. Some girls I know seem to really bond to the womanly angst in "Pride and Prejudice" or maybe it's the romantic ending.

For me, at least lately, that movie has been "Spiderman 3." I recognize that it was the weakest of the Spiderman trilogy, and it has been panned by friends of mine and professional critics alike. But from the moment it unfolded in front of me in the theater I loved it. It's as if the movie and I bonded. I wonder if every man can identify with Peter Parker the way I do. Did they pick and actor and themes that speak to mankind in general, or is it specific to nerdy guys who always have something stressing them out, aren't sure what to do with their power half the time, and never seem to really get the girl in the end?

I liked all of the Spiderman movies. They have all the elements in them to really draw me in and entertain me thoroughly for a few hours, but in this movie, the writers completely neglect the "bad guys." They throw a bunch of them in there to make up for the fact that none of them are really that good. But they didn't neglect the antagonist, the darker side of Peter Parker himself. And that's what makes the movie unbelievably appealing.

Make no mistake, the alien symbiont is not the evil one. Sure, spiderman really wasn't a jerk except when he had his alien suit on and you can argue that it altered his judgment and preferences. True true. But not only does he come to himself enough to know that it's bad and throws the suit in his trunk, but even when he has the suit on, it only amplifies his own characteristics. And it doesn't make him put it on when he's upset about having lost Mary Jane. Peter does that himself. He has not only the capacity to be a complete jerk, but the capacity to really enjoy doing so. I think the movie makers captured that element of humanity pretty well in his character. Actually they may have been clumsy and sophomoric in their attempts to do so, but it was a facet of the metaphor that impressed itself on me thoroughly. In fact, in the theater I had tears streaming down my face during several parts of the movie.

As far as I can tell, modern life is nearly devoid of the kinds of peril that make good action movies. No threats of death and dismemberment. No threat of starvation if we don't act quickly and valiantly. You have to search pretty hard to find a real bad guy of any sort, and even then you will be surprised by the degree to which they are just responding to the circumstances of their life. The main determinant of our success in the world in most areas is simply our ability to think usefully and well. And that power is pretty much innate. And yet modern life has as much conflict, danger, and distress as any action flick. We just have to fight those battles out in the quiet desperation of our hearts. The stuff we watch in movies only plays out the conflicts we feel daily. This movie tried to address the issue a bit more directly, if bluntly. And that's why I like it. When I watch it, I skip most of the fight scenes and skip to where Peter is dancing around being a punk, to where he's trying to make Mary Jane feel bad by taking another girl to the bar where she works, and of course, where he looses his rage on his friend. It's the same peter parker who killed (kind of) the guy who killed his Uncle, who allowed the killer to escape a robbery out of spite, and who vowed that he would always be the good guy from then on. But a few movies later he uses that same spite against his beloved Mary Jane.

Peter has romantic troubles. It's awesome. I'm so tired of movies where the girl and guy relationship is perfect and it's all about protecting her from the bad guys (ok, we are talking about guy flicks here. Girl flicks are about the getting together, which is also somewhat less interesting to me). Spiderman has his girl all picked out, but really, they never really seem like they are made for each other. In the first movie he was too self conscious and shy to make his moves and even let her know he was interested, in the second movie he's torn between his role as spiderman and possibly getting together with her. But in the third movie, he's just too much of a jerk. And she doesn't understand him--she has a myopic and a small mind, and for the most part she thinks only about herself. And fundamentally, that's why there relationship is hard. He has all these great intentions, but eventually selfishness, or thoughtlessness, or not really being ready/willing to be what she wants him to be, or a host of other things get in the way. And that's why it has taken him three movies to get together with Mary Jane. And that's why even though we see them blissfully together at the end, you know the story isn't over for them and happily ever after is as much in question as it was when they were not on speaking terms. That's what I think anyway.

Peter lives a troubled life. He always seems to be struggling in his schoolwork, and in his profession, in his love life, and with his family. He lives in a dump and people whose respect he really needs are constantly on his case. A naive watching of the movies might tempt us to think that the writers have simply created a lot of problems for him so we'd be more interested in watching his character, and so there could be something in the plot of the movies. But the great thing about Peter is that he doesn't have problems in school because he's not smart or because he's particularly lazy. He doesn't get beat up by bad guys because he's not strong or quick. He has a great family and friends and his problems with them are not because he doesn't love them. He just has to juggle all sorts of things, he has to bear the weight of being a superhero and a very mortal man, and sometimes he drops things.

I love Peter Parker. He's a character penned to represent the real plight of mankind and still be cool. He sits atop tall buildings at night, head down and rain streaming down his body. More powerful, quicker, and smarter than any of us, but paralyzed and torn. He has lots of people who love and care for him, and yet he is profoundly alone.

He's spiderman. He's my hero. And Spiderman 3 is the movie of my rainy days.

Lifestyle Change

2008-05-31T15:33:00.003-05:00

Every change needs a precipitating event. For some time I've been lamenting the fact that my awake schedule has not coincided with that of my fellowmen, and that I haven't been very efficient at all in working on my dissertation. I've been working from home, not seeing the sun, getting all smelly and anti-social...you get the idea. Somehow keeping a late late schedule and following my whims is not as satisfying as it was when I was younger.

Last week I had that precipitating event. My adviser called me up and said it's not good that I don't even spend time in the office because I'm not mixing my knowledge with the faculty members or attending seminars. He said I should just make a habit of working in the office like a normal mortal. He also said I need to get my backside in gear so I can have my research ready for evaluation at the end of the summer. Way to motivate!

So I started waking up at 8 and going to be at midnight. Sometimes I do a little earlier. I get up, get dressed, and go straight to the office. The scary thing to me is how well it worked out. I really do think it is partially a biological thing. I'm not a teenager that can just sleep in as long as he wants any more. In fact, I was completely accustomed to this early schedule by the second day. I set my alarm for eight every day and I have yet to not be awake already when it goes off. Well, it makes early meetings a lot easier, I can tell you that.

I have noticed some really big differences in my life since then. First of all, it is much easier these days to use my office as a workplace and home as a chillin' out place than it used to. I distinctly remember things being the other way around before. I suppose now that I have internet at home I can answer all my email and read my favorite web pages at night and use the day for working without spending work time doing those activities. Maybe I should have gotten home internet sooner. Anyway, not only has the working been much better, but the chillin' has been better. When I'm at home I don't stress as much about my work and when I'm working I am not inclined to chill out.

This makes me wonder how people who telecommute or work from home in general do it. I guess they have a different office space that they use only for work, but without the stress of other people around you, deadlines, and regular hours, I don't know how they manage it. But at least I know (again) that I can't really manage that.

I guess another thing that has happened is that suddenly my next research deadline feels very much more real than it did before. I have always been self-motivated in a certain sense---I don't generally play around and I'm always doing things that someone could conceivably get paid to do---but I don't usually stick with one thing for as long as one would a career. Especially not things I have to do. Not without motivation. So now I have that motivation. Yay for deadlines. I'm experiencing a lot more stress, but it's the active kind of stress. The kind that causes action, not the unhealthy latent stuff that keeps you up at night.

And I have an officemate and lots of people at the office who drop by and talk to me. It's not optimal from a productivity point of view, but I no longer crave human contact. In fact there are times when I relish solitude. How weird is that?

The bike ride to school is doing wonders for keeping my healthy. Because my comfort seat was made for a bike with significantly different geometry than mine has, it pushes me forward so I put a lot of weight on my arms. It's like being in pushup position for 15 minutes only I keep having to move the arms as I steer, so I'm getting pretty tough. Now I just need an exercise ball to use as a chair in the office and I'll be good to go. Still working on a good solution to the stinkiness problem.

Am I freaking out and worried about my research? Yes, yes I am. But it's a good kind of freaking out. And I'm not generally grossed out by life as much as I was before. Just freaking out about small parts of it.

That's quite the improvement. And it was about time.

I wonder if I could hire someone to stress me out once in a while...

Survival in the Wild

2008-05-07T01:52:00.006-05:00

Today I sat around most of the day in my cushy house, avoiding whatever UV radiation might be outside and worrying mostly about bedsores on my butt, but it's been a day of primitive living.

I watched a documentary on cavemen and all the missing link stuff first. Then I got my netflix movies: the whole season of "Survivorman." It turns out that this is not the show I thought it was. The show I was actually trying to get was "Man vs. Wild." In the latter show this ex special forces guy gets dropped in the wilderness and shows you all sorts of crazy ways of surviving out there with just a knife and a canteen until he gets to civilization of some kind. He has a camera crew but they are not really allowed to help him out. He does all sorts of crazy stunts like MAKING a compass, catching and eating raw fish, frogs, bugs, etc., building a shelter, and of course, making fire. He does all sorts of crazy stunts that are really interesting to watch (I think he takes a lot of time to make the video). "Survivorman" is what I got. It's a similar idea, but way more real. It's this canadian guy who gets dropped off and has to survive for a week. He has no camera crew and has to carry his camera around with him. It is more believable and has less of a staged feel, but somewhat less fun to watch and it seems like he doesn't have much success finding food and shelter compared to the dude in "Man vs Wild." I like them both, though. In fact, I can't seem to keep myself from watching them.

My life is shockingly unmanly in some ways. I do worry about having enough food to eat, but the way to get food is to walk a perilous four blocks to the grocery store or persuade someone to give me a ride. The producers of these shows realize that there are millions of guys out there in the same situation. We are made to work physically and face a few scary things in order to survive, not to sit around all day programming and worrying about our dissertation. Hopefully most of the other guys watching these shows aren't in as rough a shape as far as satisfying manly instincts as I am. Maybe Heber is on to something with his ultralight backpacking idea and stealth camping.

There's one thing about "Survivorman" that I do have experience with, though. He's alone for a week and has to fight despondency associated with being alone. The structure of my social life has been changing lately and today I realized I wasn't going to be able to talk to anyone until evening, and then not for very long. I played some piano for a while to try and raise my spirits, and I realized that without talking my vocal cords dry out and get weak. When I tried to make some sounds this afternoon I sounded funny, so I tried singing along with the piano. My voice is more than normally out of shape. I guess I won't be singing any solos for a while. So I tried humming to myself a bit during the day as I was walking to the store and around the time I was playing the piano. I'm thinking about starting to talk to myself during the day in order to keep myself in the habit of making conversation, and for the sake of my vocal cords.

Frequently I see people on the El singing to themselves. It's actually very rude. Usually they are listening to their ipods and singing along, usually gospel (they are always black) and seem completely immune to the subtle hints that people around them don't want to hear their version of the song. For a long time I was annoyed by it, but now I'm beginning to wonder if they are trying to fight off the effects of being alone as well. Cities are funny places. There are crowds of people all around you and almost everyone is lonely. People with families typically don't choose to live in deep cities (and yes, Evanston is deep city, despite its cute appearance) so people live in studios and one bedrooms and end up singing to themselves on the el. Anyway, city people have annoyed me in many ways for a long time, but the longer I'm here, the more I find myself becoming like them.

Los Lunas and Provo may not actually be very close to "Survivorman" wilderness situations, but they are closer than hanging out between my blackout curtains and 24-inch monitor with only my pets for company. Luckily I have netflix, and I can live out just a bit of wilderness survival vicariously.

New Addiction

2008-05-06T01:45:00.002-05:00

I officially have a new addiction: editing Wikipedia.

From what I have been able to discover, every living person on this earth--or at least all males--think Wikipedia is the greatest thing since Google, and maybe greater than that. Finally, there is a single repository of all the information that you really wanted to know, organized and given just as you want it. It's better than other sources of information primarily because what you find there is what you actually wanted to read on a given subject. Ok I won't talk about it any more from a theoretical perspective because I think we all know how great it is.

What I didn't fully realize is that I can be a meaningful part of it! I noticed as I browsed through (you guessed it) the tarantula article and the many articles relating to tarantula species, that there were lots of typos, that there were a few factual errors, and that many species, even common and important species, simply had a wikipedia stub or no article there. So I did a little editing. I added a few articles. And now I can't stop.

Granted, most of my contributions are cleaning up the writing and information in existing pages, or creating pages that just have the bare minimum that you would want to know--barely more than a stub--but I'm a part of it. And it makes me feel good. Once the clock hits midnight I check out wikipedia and get started adding little articles. Eventually I'll probably appeal to the users at arachnoboards for pictures of the various species that they would be willing to post, and before long all the significant species of tarantula will have a short article about them, complete with picture and the basic information that anyone (like me) might want to know.

So far I've added the entry for Poecilotheria regalis, Bracypelma albopilosum and Eupalaestrus campestratus. And I cleaned up or added information to a number of other pages (such as everyone's favorite: Grammostola aureostriata). There's only one wikipedia, and I'm the first one to write about these guys. My work will belong to the ages and future generations will benefit from it.

I feel so....productive.

Home Sweet Home

2008-05-03T22:58:00.006-05:00

There's something special about one's own home, isn't there? Everywhere I have lived I have customized to support my sometimes very unique habits. The first example to comes to mind is the stuff I've set up to allow me to sleep peacefully until later in the mornings, and in some cases, the afternoon. In my first room here in chicago I simply put up blue curtains over my windows and slept with earplugs and a shirt draped over my eyes. When I moved out into my studio I went to the next level and covered the windows with aluminum foil and sheets. Later when I had more time and money going on, I invested in some blackout curtains, which I kept draped across all my windows so my room was dark all day long if I wanted to sleep, and it was always good for watching movies. I mean working on the computer. I bought a deep freeze because I never go shopping (at least at the time I didn't). And I bought the most powerful microwave oven available on the market so I could pop a bag of popcorn completely in a minute and thirty seconds flat. Well usually I let it go for a minute thirty seven, but you get the idea. I set up bookcases strategically to support and frame my piano and giant speakers and carefully designed and built a music stand big enough to hold 5 pages--because I don't seem to be able to play piano and turn my own pages.

Then I arrived in my new house. My bedroom is just a bit too small for my multitude of plastic drawers, piano, and a bed, so I got some lumber and built myself a loft bed complete with ladder. And let me tell you, it's built like a tank. But of course you can't reach the light switch from the bed, so a clapper to turn on and off the lights. A sunrise simulating alarm clock, a shock absorbing pad under the carpet so it doesn't hurt to jump down. And of course, a body ball to tone my abs while I'm working at my computer. This picture of my bed is actually a bit old. I built some supports to keep my mattress on there, rearranged the drawers below, added non-slip booties to the ladder, and piled more blankets and pillos on the bed since then.

Sometimes I feel like my place in life is to customize and optimize, beginning with my bedroom and my living conditions and then those of the beings around me.

Like my pets!

First there's my tarantula. I originally kept her in a critter keeper with a piece of cardboard to sit on and potting soil. She hated it. She spent all her time up on the walls of her enclosure trying to get out or at least get away from the nasty dirt. She actually made me wonder how long a tarantula can sit on a vertical surface. Apparently for a long, long time. I dried out the potting soil completely, which was most of the problem, and put a hide in there for her. It was a broken clay pot. She never did really use it as a hide, but she sat on top of it. There wasn't much floor space, but tarantulas don't need much. In fact, they need almost none at all. The problem was that any bug I threw in there immediately ran into the hide and was pretty safe there, from what I saw. In the two months she spent in that critter keeper she only ever ate one small cricket and let me tell you, I gave her lots of opportunities. And every time I opened the critter keeper to throw a bug in or add water, the lid popped loudly and scared Stella so she lost her desire to eat. These tarantulas can be very delicate creatures in terms of their feelings. Oh yeah, and the plastic the critter keeper is made of scratches exceptionally easily and soon becomes impossible to see through.

So I started conceiving plans for a new and optimized enclosure. It shouldn't be too tall (between the spider's legspan and 1.5 times their leg span from substrate to roof is the acceptable range) because terrestrial spiders like Stella tend to climb up things and then fall down and go splat. The material for the enclosure was an interesting problem. Glass is cheap but hard to work with. You can't easily drill ventilation holes in it or anything. And gluing things to glass is typically done using silicone, which is not real strong. There's polycarbonate sheets, which are exceptionally strong and clear, but associated with the strength is softness, which means it scratches easily. So we have acrylic: plexiglass. This material is quite card for a plastic and doesn't tend to scratch. It can be had in sheets of various thicknesses and worked fairly easily. Cutting it is a pain if you don't have a table saw, though. You are supposed to score it like you do glass and then break it. However, I found that for 1/4 inch thick material, breaking it is almost impossible and yields a very messy edge. It's no glass. So I found a plastics retailer online that would cut the pieces for me and ship them. It was very expensive. And I bought some acrylic "cement" which is funny stuff. It's not a cement or glue at all. It's a powerful solvent that melts the acrylic. Then they stick together and it dries away. This was a most fascinating process for me. The solvent is thinner than water and you set the pieces together (usually tape them in place) and then squirt solvent along the edge. It sucks in by capillary action and dries immediately, so you have one piece of acrylic after just a few seconds. It's really fun.

Anyway I put a hinged lid on it and "cemented" acrylic hinges and clasps, then I built an automatic watering system, so I can add water without opening the lid. I drilled holes in the lid in a pattern to aerate the place (mostly to dry out substrate, not for oxygen. Spiders need very little oxygen). For substrate I used coconut fiber. It's all the rage in the tarantula hobby for it's softness, resistence to rot, ability to hold a shape, and general healthiness. I put a red lamp beside her for warmth (tarantulas hate light but they can't see red light). Since she never used her hide I didn't bother with that. I put her in and she loved it. She set herself down right next to the lamp, webbed the floor a bit, and stretched out her legs in tarantula hunting fashion (they hunt by sensing vibrations in the substrate). From that day onward she was an excellent, excellent eater and has always located herself where she is in plane view. And she never climbed the walls at all. The only remaining modification her cage needs is a ladder of some kind IN the water trough so roaches can get out when they (invariably) fall in. I found out that roaches sink and they die after 10 or 15 seconds in the water. Stupid bugs.

After a while I realized that when I was warmer in the enclosure than in the room water would condense on the front wall of the enclosure condensation formed, making it difficult to see inside. So I drilled a couple of extra holes on the side of the enclosure near where the condensation was forming. Problem solved. I have to be careful to drill holes in the side up high beyond where a roach could possibly reach or they would climb out. Bad deal.

So with my now optimized tarantula enclosure Stella and I are happy happy campers. But I have this burgeoning colony of Blatta lateralis roaches. How to house them?

Roaches like the dark. They like to hide in places where they have something under their legs and something on top of them, and they poop wherever they are. They drown if you give them water, so you have to provide water crystals (polymers that absorb water like crazy, similar to diaper water absorbing stuff. They eat it and are hydrated). But of course, to get into their food and water dishes, they need some way to climb because they can't climb smooth surfaces. Anyway I bought a plastic bin, some cork board, glue of various kinds, window screen and some aluminum foil and built my optimized roach cage. There are over 1000 roaches in this bin, but you don't see them because they are hiding in the cork. The design allows their poo (frass) to fall to the bottom and they feel comfy all the time. It's a really fun project. And now it's finished. Oh and the tub is coated in aluminum foil to keep it dark and sits on a hot mat to keep it warm.

The foods you see there are pieces of apple, oatmeal, roach food I bought, and then there are the water crystals. The cork is held in place by bolts and nuts. I put a bit of egg carton over the food sometimes to they can eat and feel safe.

I truly do love optimizing on this stuff. Too bad you can't really make a living that way.

Theory of Tarantula Ownership

2008-04-27T19:58:00.020-05:00

People are very predictable. Whenever I tell a new person that my primary hobby is tarantula keeping they are very consistent in their response: a little surprise, a little disgust, a little silence. Then they ask me what got my into the hobby, or why I would ever keep a giant disgusting arachnid in my home, depending on their level of tact. After so many experiences, I've prepared some stock answers:

--Minimal space requirements
--Minimal care requirements
--They look cool
--They don't stink or make noise
--You can neglect them completely for months on end without any detrimental effect

And then if I have time I tell them the story of how I saw a picture of Ashley holding one and it just got me started on the subject. Of course, there's not really much truth in those explanations. I mean, to say that I keep tarantulas because they are easy is like a runner saying they train for marathons because it's easier than climbing mountains, or a fisherman saying he wakes up early in the morning and goes out in the cold to hold a rod in the water for hours because fish taste good. Yeah, I mean, those things are true, but sitting at home eating potato chips is easier than running, and fish bought in a store will taste better. And the lowest effort and inconvenience pet situation is not to have any. In fact, that's the situation I chose for many years. It was pretty easy.

People have pets for very different reasons. I think my parents had pets for practical reasons: to bark at thieves, eat mice, produce milk, etc. Here in the city, where most people are either single or lead useless lives (it seems) everyone is bitterly lonely. So most people have pets because otherwise their lives are completely meaningless. Or because the pets keep them company. So they choose intelligent, loving pets like dogs and cats. Never mind the many trips outside to have the dogs do their business or the cat hair in their clothing, or smelling like their pet all the time. While I can see where these people are coming from, with their desperate need to connect with another living thing (particularly one that depends on them), I always thought they were a little silly.

And then I started working from home. If you think you do fine without human interaction, try working from your home and not having a family for a little while. On the plus side you don't expose yourself to any germs. On the downside, your voice stops working as well, you get bedsores on your butt, and you forget how to interact with other living things. When you talk to people you end up telling them way more than they want to hear on any subject that comes up, and not caring that they are growing inwardly annoyed at you. You may even start a blog....

In my case, besides completely saturating all of my friends' needs and wants to hang out, and then watching every movie I could imagine would be interesting, I started getting really obsessive about anything that interests me. Cameras, pianos (not playing them, mind you, just piano construction and comparison), and perhaps the odd tarantula.

The first thing that attracted me to tarantulas in general, and which provides most of the impetus to my continued pursuit of them as a hobby is my scientific curiosity about them. I mean, they are really interesting animals. There are hundreds of species with dramatically different behaviors and constructions. They are giant spiders, with brains that are probably not much more developed than that of any other bug, but they are large enough to watch and learn the intricate behaviors that are so shockingly different from our own. Any mammalian pet is going to have a lot of behaviors that, at the end of the day, make perfect sense to us. We worry about boring them, about giving them affection, and having relationships of trust with them. With spiders none of these things are an option. We don't intuitively comprehend their lives because they differ as much from ours as we would expect an alien life form to. They are just...interesting. And the fact that you can have one in your home that will last for decades, not give you any hastle, and not really care that it is in captivity makes it really appealing. A tarantula on your bookcase requires little more care than the books it may be next to. At least in principle.

I suppose plants are an easier hobby than tarantulas, but there is one element of tarantulas that few other pets--or indeed hobbies--shares: they are rather terrifying. Our natural instincts tell us to fear tarantulas, whether we know that they are harmless, gentle creatures or not. Just looking at a tarantula gives you just a little bit of an adrenaline boost. And holding it delivers a very concentrated dose, even when you have done it many many times. I still get very shaky when I hold Stella and I firmly believe that she will never bite me or anyone else. She's capable of it, but it's not really in her behavioral makeup. This principle, that tarantulas are interesting because they scare us, has become more clear to me as I have interacted with people who are much deeper in the hobby than I am. When I decided on the species of tarantula that I did, I was looking for a tarantula that was as docile and gentle as possible, and that would be easy to take care of. On the tarantula forums I expected a lot of discussions about which tarantulas were the best pets in this dimension. What I found instead was that the members were talking about the most aggressive, poisonous, and downright ill tempered tarantulas out there, and talking about them affectionately. Among true tarantula hobbyists, the mean tarantulas (that flare fangs at you when you just walk by their cage) are highly regarded and sought after. The gentle variety are simply too boring for a true hobbyist. I guess after a while they lose their fear of gentle tarantulas...I'm not at that point yet.

There's another element of tarantulas that adds to their draw: they are rather unique pets. Although we all know someone who has had a tarantula, they are still not common enough in our experience to be boring. For example, if I go to visit a friend and they have a dog, it would be very unlikely that I would be super interested in where they got the dog and how it behaves, nor would I be particularly interested to interact with it. But a tarantula is a completely different matter. And if we go beyond the basic three or four species that people generally keep, we get into truly exotic and interesting animals.

One of the most desired tarantulas on the market these days is Poecilotheria metallica. This spider has all of the characteristics that would make it desirable for a serious hobbyist: it is stunningly blue, it is large, it is surprisingly fast moving, and based on its closest spider relatives, we can infer that is poison is transcendently potent. It would likely put you in the hospital if it bit you. And it has one other bonus feature: it was only recently introduced to the hobby and there just aren't that many of them around (apparently they are rare in the wild as well). It's the perfect spider. Of course, there are several elements of this spider that make it less than optimal for a family pet--no one would recommend holding it, ever---but for the hobbyist, it's perfect.

For most tarantula keepers, one tarantula is more than enough. One gets plenty of opportunities to see them eat bugs, which is probably the most entertaining thing they do. And one tarantula is enough to frighten one's friends, and possibly one's self, for a lifetime. For anyone fitting in this category, the best tarantula is docile, lives a long time, and is easy to keep. And it doesn't require a very specialized cage (arboreal tarantulas like P. metallica require cages with a lot of height and most likely some bugs that will get up off the ground). That's why most of us have the most basic tarantula, Grammostola rosea or perhaps if we have a bit more money, Brachypelma smithi (I'll talk about tarantula species in a later post).

Despite this, I observe that a surprising number of tarantula keepers have a fairly large number of these guys. I think this is fundamentally possible because tarantulas require so little care. In fact, what they require is to be left alone. It's easy to have 20 of them or so and still not feel like you are putting any effort into them. They don't need you, and if you want to see them doing anything except sitting around you have to have a number of them. That is, it takes many tarantulas to equal as much "pettishness" as you would get from one mammal. And the fact that they require so little space makes it possible to have a closet full of the little guys. Further, a major reason to have tarantulas is because of their interesting looks and behavior. Every different species of tarantula could be a significant addition to a collection in the sense of adding something else worth looking at.

I find myself sort of spanning the chasm between the two groups of people. I only have one tarantula, but I have put considerable time into setting up its enclosure, getting a colony of feeder roaches going, and researching many different kinds of tarantulas online. In fact, I would guess that extremely few people have put as much time into tarantulas as me and only have one in their collection. I suppose the main reason I have only one, and she's a very docile species, is that I live in a small apartment and don't have very much space. I have been considering going to the all animal expo, which is held here once a month, and possibly buying something very different from Stella, like a super fuzzy Avicularia species. I could get either a common pinktoe A. avicularia, or an Antilles pinktoe (A. veriscolor) if I want something more colorful. These tarantulas are very different from Stella in so many ways, although they are still considered docile and handleable. Sometimes I do get the urge to get a nice Poecilotheria like the metallica, though probably one of its non-blue, cheaper relatives. If I had some power tools I could easily make optimized cages for them.

I spend some time at least every day reading about tarantulas, many exotic species that I will never own. I find them very interesting. And they are the sort of thing that it's fun to learn about and you don't necessarily have to own them all. I do have some urge to own tarantulas, but I doubt if my collection will ever exceed 5 or 10 of them total. After having the experience of owning the major types of tarantula, the details of the different species are just as good when seen on forums and in youtube videos as they are in your own home.

So I guess my roommate can sleep easy for a while. I probably won't have more than two tarantulas while I'm still here in Chicago, and neither of them will be deadly.

Roach Tale

2008-04-26T20:05:00.011-05:00

I wish for a pile of hundreds of squirmy, scuttley roaches.

I suppose that's something few people say to themselves, and those who have said it have not said it that many times. But roaches have been an ongoing concern for some time in my life and I almost can't keep myself from thinking about them day in and day out. How did I get here?

The lastest in the long list of topics about which I have obsessed has been tarantulas. Four months ago about I saw a picture of a friend of mine holding a tarantula in her hand. I remembered that although I have had several opportunities over the course of my life I have never really held a tarantula. I always kind of backed away at the last minutes, paralyzed. Perhaps I thought that if I used my mind instead of my instincts to decide this one I would open the door to experiencing all sorts of things about which I have had prior phobias. Actually I have the picture that started it all..

Anyway there was also a conversation in which I guessed that tarantulas were good pets because they probably only live a year or so. This revealed my ignorance in an embarrassing fashion (they live for like 25 years...the females anyway) and got me started on a little bit of research on the subject. It turns out that tarantulas are very interesting animals. There are lots of species of them and they have very interesting behavior. But I'm sure I will talk about them more in a later post.

I suppose the timing was good...I was running out of things to research in the world of digital cameras, and I was getting awfully lonely (a byproduct of working from home) so I was inclined to get a pet. I just didn't want the stink or the trouble associated with pets. Well, tarantulas can go months without food or care of any kind, don't stink, don't take up much space, and they aren't that expensive once you buy them. So after a lot of research, I decided on a species and negotiated to get the most docile and one of the largest species known to man, the Chaco Golden Knee (Grammostola aureostriata).

This is one of those moments where I weird myself out by realizing that I'm no longer a child and I can do whatever I want. I mean, I guess I just always thought my parents or someone would have stopped me if I had ever wanted a tarantula before. I remember having that feeling about fish when I was first exposed to them as a child. Of course, those feelings about my parents probably would have been wrong, as they were with the fish. But thought patterns of children are the foundation of our minds, and it's hard to shake some of those feelings. I frequently just don't comprehend the extent to which I really do have agency.

Anyway back to the tarantula. There are certain things tarantulas need: an enclosure, water, soil. And of course, bugs. This was one of the things I was not looking forward to about a tarantula: getting crickets all the time from the store. In my research among the tarantula forums, I realized that crickets are only used by the neophytes in the tarantula hobby. Those who know use roaches. They don't smell, are quiet, are healthy for the tarantula, and best of all they reproduce so you don't always have to be going to the store to buy stupid little bugs. This really appealed to my sense of independence and preparation: a self-sufficient colony of feeder insects for my tarantula. It's kind of like cyclists and lightweight backpackers. No, they don't need to shave off those extra 5 grams, but being an expert in that field is really about optimizing. Well, being an expert in the field of tarantulas is about minimizing the effort you have to put in for their upkeep, and still keeping them healthy and growing fast. In my case this lead me to build a new optimized tarantula enclosure (with an automatic waterer) and get a colony of roaches. And there are other optimizations I've done. Funny how much like work some hobbies may become.

Anyway, no one wants a bunch of nasty infesting roaches in their house, which is why tarantula experts use tropical roaches. These species are like the ones we know in that they are related and reproduce rapidly, but they need high heat and humidity to survive, so they die if they escape. With roaches, that's a very good thing. The roach species that has been getting all the good PR lately is Blaptica dubia, the Guyana spotted roach. B. dubia is a roach from South American jungles with a large, meaty body. They are slow moving and well behaved. Really they are more like giant rolly pollies. They freeze when they are scared, which makes them very easy to handle, and they are unable to climb smooth surfaces, which makes them easy to house. They had rave reviews, so I asked the dude who sent my tarantula (hereafter, Stella) to include a beginner colony of Blaptica dubia. I'll tell you what, they were great pets. I frequently handled them when I wanted to interact with a pet but I knew that Stella needed to be left alone. For two months I kept them in my room and raised them with the utmost care. I almost got attached to the little guys. There was only one problem: Stella wasn't eating the little buggers. For a long time I thought it was a problem with her. She was very stressed and maybe just not a very good eater, but she always ignored them. A month passed, two months passed. I kept throwing roaches in there and leaving them overnight and I'd wake the next morning to find Stella and the roach both there, perhaps with her leg on the roach's back. I think the fundamental problem, besides maybe the roaches not being the right size/shape for what she was expecting, is that the roach's fear instinct was giving it a leg up. It would freeze and pull it's little legs in and then Stella wouldn't recognize that it's a freaking bug! I tried throwing younger ones in there, but they had the same behavior, even more so. And they had another annoying behavior: they would burrow down into the substrate when Stella wasn't looking and stay there, apparently with no intention of resurfacing. After Stella had molted and was hungry hungry I had my only successful attempt at feeding her a dubia roach: an adult male which she put a leg on, but when I returned, she was eating it. After that I tried a few other roaches but with no success. It was kind of a one time deal apparently.

I decided one day to try a cricket in there. I threw it in and watched for a second. The cricket ran around like and idiot and then Stella dashed over there and ate it immediately. So I threw another one. Same result. Then another. Same. At one point she had four crickets in her fangs at once and showed no signs of giving up. That week I fed her 26 crickets and she was still hungry. I talked to some people on arachoboards and some of them had had similar experiences. They suggested trying a different species: Blatta lateralis.

Now, Blatta lateralis is a roach that has just a little too much in common with Blattella Germanica, the common infesting roach. They are the same size, have similar reproduction rates, and both run around fast. I originally opted against this species because there was some risk of infestation. And they were not cute and beloved by the insect keeping community like dubia. But they were much more active, don't burrow, and were the size of a cricket. So I gave my dubia away to someone from arachnoboards (who had some lizards, and I guess some tarantulas who were less picky than Stella) and ordered a colony of 100 lateralis. Interestingly, they were really cheap by comparison. The colony only cost me 11 dollars (and that's including the shipping cost). When they arrived I realized that he had sent me a significant overcount. He probably sent my like 400 roaches. Of course, most of them were very young. Still it was a pile. I realized something else: Blatta lateralis are ugly, ugly roaches. Hateful even. They are fast, and light, and have long antennae and their little heads stick out and say "I'm gross." By the time I had them for just a few minutes, they had dropped like 4 new egg cases. These little guys are reproducing all the time. Like all the time. And scuttling around. They sit around eating and then when light hits them , they dash away. It totally conjures up memories from the mission, and having to keep all our utensils in the refrigerator to keep nasty roach feet off of them.

And then there's the smell. There was one failing of Blaptica dubia that I failed to mention: their poo smelled just a little. And in particular, it was an odor that I'm allergic to. This is a common report from insect keepers and seems to be specific to that species. They have something in their poo that irritates people's noses and causes allergies. Well, Blatta lateralis do not have this failing. But they do have a smell about them. It smells almost like burning plastic. It's the same smell that I learned to discenrn on my mission: the smell of roaches. Thankfully it doesn't seem to leave their cage much, so I only smell it when I open it to take the little buggers out.

Needless to say, I won't be handling these little guys and growing attached to them.

I went ahead and fed a few of them to Stella. It was a spectacular thing to see. They run around quite quickly, which means Stella goes for them right away, but then they are almost fast enough to escape, so she sometimes has to almost chase them down. They are a great feeder from a spectator perspective. However, each roach doesn't seem to weigh much, especially the males, which were the main things I wanted to feed. I would say they weigh less than a large cricket, so you have to feed a lot. I received quite an overcount as I mentioned before, and this is one of the most prolific species of roach in the world. They reproduce fast, and they grow up pretty fast, so I can expect that before long I'll have a pretty big group of roaches going on. However, I am just not satisfied.

Right now I'm trying to fatten Stella up as much as possible. Tarantulas don't need much food, but they will eat quite a bit if given the opportunity. It is possible to overfeed a mature tarantula, but feeding a growing tarantula, like Stella, just results in faster growth. Tarantulas become more docile and handleable as they get larger (because they have fewer natural enemies) and they are overall just more impressive. Couple that with the fact that they are very slow growing creatures and live for a long time--Stella is probably four years old and still only 5.5" or so. Eventually she should be 8 inches or more, from the end of one leg to the farthest other leg--and you get strong reason to encourage growth. Powerfeeding them results in rapid growth. As in, it takes them only a handful of years to mature. That's what we are going for. I have a red light bulb warming her, and now I want to powerfeed. Well the problem is that I have already fed her most of the mature male roaches that were in my collection. And I don't really want to feed females and decrease the productive capacity of my colony. Sure, I could wait a month or two and there would be lots and lots of roaches. I could also feed Stella crickets in the mean time, but I like to feel that I have done well and beaten the universe when it comes to roach and tarantula care. That's why I want to order a pile more of roaches from the same dude. I can get roughly five times as many roaches as I got this time for $22. And that includes shipping. I just can't resist that. In fact, I think I'm going to do it. If I do that then I will feel comfortable feeding Stella all the mature roaches that I have here, and by the time the new ones arrive I probably will not have fed all the adults in my collection. Yes, it's probably a bit excessive, but I really want these roaches. I want the security of knowing that I have enough roaches to feed Stella for the rest of her life (with the little roach babies) and not have a liquidity problem in the mean time. $22 is not too much for that kind of security is it?