Little Jar of Horrors

Everett has been obsessed with traps this summer.  Fly traps, rabbit traps, booby traps, you name it, he's tried to build it.

And so came the advent of our bug jars.  After cleaning up glass shards from a few broken Ragu jars, I wisened up and began using peanut butter jars.  They worked great.

Everett was thrilled one day when I showed him a little group of wolf spiders that were congregating on the side of our house.  He and I caught three with little trouble, and we brought them inside to look them up.

Despite some fearful web commentators, the general professional consensus seems to be that wolf spiders are generally harmless.  They can bite and they are actually a little venomous, but the venom only causes mild, localized pain, which is the case with most spider bites.

So after I explained to Everett that he was never, under any circumstances, to open this jar inside the house or try to play with the spiders, which he readily agreed too, we noted some interesting facts:

• Wolf spiders do not build webs.  They have excellent eyesight and hunt their prey by running after them, pouncing on them, and biting with their powerful jaws, just like a real wolf.
• The mother wolf spiders are grouped among some of the more maternal animals because they carry their babies around on their back until they are about halfway grown.
• Many wolf spiders are diurnal.
• Wolf spiders eat other spiders (including other wolf spiders), crickets, grasshoppers, earwigs, ants, and beetles.

Everett and I were eager to find out if we would witness a spider throw-down.  Surely one of them would eventually get hungry enough to go after the others, right?  Well, although we did not get to watch an exciting fight, we did return to the jar several times to find sucked-dry spider pieces littering the bottom.

We added a few insects here and there, and once our wolf spider colony had become cannibalistically depleted, we found some new, energetic little guys to repopulate the jar.

Everett's favorite discoveries were:

• Spiders poop.  Yes, they do.  
• Spiders turn darker when they are about to die. (We may have forgotten to keep water in the jar so some of the spiders died a slow death of dehydration.  Oops.)
• A tiny web-weaving spider we found and added to the jar spun its own safety-net web at the top of the jar and avoided being captured by the large predators on the bottom.
• No matter what the internet said, three wolf spiders were not enough to take down one cricket.

Everett was especially interested to note that the "fangs" you can see gleaming from the faces of these little beasts are not actually fangs.  They are pedipalps, which are little appendages the spiders use to handle things with.

Unfortunately, our wolf spider experiment came to an end when a neighbor girl angrily dumped out the spiders in the backyard (I believe it was the jar she desired, not the spiders).  Everett was sad but I am sure the lone live spider was relieved to be set free where nature intended.

This was a fun little summer diversion for Everett and me.  And no, no one else in the house was morbid enough to appreciate our interest or share our enthusiasm for the project.  But that's ok--this is exactly why Everett and I are such good buddies.

(Everett with a bird trap he built, which did not actually catch a bird, but which was fun for him to build anyway.)