RIP Pippi Longstocking

Hello Lovelies,

I woke up this morning and the Pipster had shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to the big web in the sky. Then, as if this day couldn’t get any worse, I got to work which looked like a crime scene so I spent the morning mopping up blood from in front of the shop. 

Pippi was a complicated Spiderbabe. She was feisty. She HATED to have her tank moved. Even if you were just moving it so you could open the lid to add food for her, she would glare at you (well, maybe not glare—despite having eight eyes, tarantulas are quite blind) but she would definitely show her displeasure. She was FLICKER. And by that, I mean anything she didn’t like she would use a back leg to flick off a cloud of hairs in protest. She did this so often her abdomen had a big ole bald spot. Yep, our baby had a bald bum.

Flicking hairs is a defence mechanism in the wild as the hairs are barbed and extremely irritating. Tarantulas will flick hairs at a predator to blind them and be able to escape. It is also worth knowing that itching power you used to be able to order for cheap from the back of comic books was probably ground tarantula hair. Because of this I always like to wear protective goggles and gloves when I dealt with her.

She was also lightning fast. There were many times that everyone else got fed but she had to wait because she was also a wall climber. She would climb up the sides of her tank and then sliiiiide down which really could have used a squeegee sound effect because it was hilarious. But because she was a potential escape artist if she was attempting to climb up, we daren’t take the lid off for fear she would do a runner. So, she often had to wait for her supper until she settled back on the ground like a sensible spider.

I thought she was gearing up for a moult. She did it last year about this time and she was showing many of the signs. She was sitting with her bum in the water dish (more than usual) and she was doing what Spiderman used to call “spider yoga” where they press their bodies into the corner of the tank and arch backwards to get their carapace ready to pop off when it was time. She was also eating less (normally she was a greedy gobbler) but that is also a sign of getting ready for a moult. I wasn’t too worried.

A few days ago, she went to her favourite place in the back of the tank. When she wasn’t climbing and sliding, she liked to scrunch herself up into the small gap between the wall of her tank and her hidey cup. She took after her mummy on this as I too like to see if I can fit in small places (and get stuck.)

On Friday I gave the tank a jostle and she flicked hard at me. Saturday I was loathe to disturb her but did a little tappity-tap on the wall beside her and she moved her leg as if to flick but very little hairs came off. I attributed this to the fact that she was a baldy-bum and there wasn’t much left to flick. Sunday night I did the tappity tap and she raised a leg in warning—like swatting you away or giving you the finger. Though with eight legs how do you know which is the middle finger one?

I looked in on her this morning at around seven and she didn’t move at all, with a tappity-tap or a quite severe jostle of the tank. Oh dear. Then I did the water test because she HATED to get water splashed on her (something that was difficult if you were trying to fill up her water dish while she was sitting in it. Still water=OK, but falling water was a big ole NOPE.) Nothing. So, sadly I knew she had passed on.

At that point it was raining, so I took her out and examined for signs of disease but there were none that I could find. Her abdomen was a little shrunken, but I took that as she hadn’t been eating as much in preparation for the moult. I wonder if what happened was this. Did she ask herself:

“Do I have enough energy to do a full moult at my age?”

“No, I don’t.”

The End.

She was between fourteen and fifteen years old (hard to place her age but we have looked after her for fourteen years and she was at least six months old when we brought her home) so that is a good old age to be, and it does become much harder to moult the older they get—they just don’t have the enormous energy it takes to complete this exhausting process.

It stopped raining about 8:30, so as the ground was soft, I decided to take her out and bury her in the front garden before work. She is out there with several of her spider sisters (and 2 brothers.)

So, this just leaves Christina Rossetti. She is the last Spiderbabe of the original eight. She is between nineteen and twenty years old (she was definitely an adult when we adopted her in 2008) and I thought she would go before Pippi or Frida (who died in January). Rossetti hasn’t moulted since 2017 and is so chilled out she is basically horizontal, so it is difficult to tell how much time she has left. It is hard because the death of every Spiderbabe severs a connection between me and my beloved Amazing Spiderman because our love of arachnids was one of the things that brought us together. But I will admit it has been very stressful trying to care for everyone on my own. You definitely needed a Captain to feed/water etc and a lookout to be sure they didn’t escape while you did it especially with Pippi.

 So, goodbye to our feisty redhead. Our beloved Pip.