Cyriocosmus elegans breeding project!

Earlier today I caught my female drumming alot in her enclosure. I found this to be odd behavious considering I have no adult male cyriocosmus.

7 hours later ( ) I decided to check my subadult elegans to see if it had molted. Indeed it has and he is now a mature male!

I decieded to give it ago and put their enclosures (a little too small, I know) up against eachother and remove the lids.

Tha male approached her very slowly. None of them were drumming.


Then he started to web!






After he had spun for a while the female caught interest and started approaching him SLOWLY




Suddenly she bolts at him, but he reacted lightning fast so I decided not to do anything yet, as it seemed he could take care of himself.


I decided to give her a dubia nymph to mellow her up a little and soon enough he starts to approach her and drum slightly.


She was very aggressive and showed no signs of hornyness..


Between taking these pictures she chased him away like 4-5 times but he kept pushing and going at it. She got MAD


She got so mad she actually grabbed his molt furiously and started biting and crunching it.


Stupidly I let them interact some more, just in case. He just seemed so sure he would succeed that he convinced me too. After some more flirting she attacked him, bit him in his leg/s and he ran away. He seem to be doing fine now tho.

I threw in a bunch of dubia nymphs to the female and called it a day. When I feel I've fattened her up some more, I will give it another try.

This is by far the most nervewrecking encounter I have seen . I'm still shaking. A little because it was so scary to watch, but also because I have more trouble finding male C. elegans than male P. metallicas and M. balfouris..!

Im going to go to bed now...

few looked like it was quite the long and stressful endeavour!

really great pics though :3

Yeah, should have seen earlier that there were no chance for mating here, and separated them. Well, it could have gone alot worse so

It's a good attempt. Not everyday is Sunday isn't it

Nice capture btw. Very nice "storyboarding" that got me hooked on reading.. lolz

Hehe, thanks! It was very exciting and terrifying at the same time! Really dissapointed nothing happened =/ I've been looking forward to breeding cyriocosmus.

Oh well. I got plenty of chances. Have 3 adult females, c. venezuelensis, c. perezmilesi and c. elegns. Also i have 4 juvenuile venezuelensis, 5 juvenile perezmilesi and 4 juvenile cyriocosmus sp. leetzi Cant wait!

this is the second spider breeding thing ive seen. the first the person freaked out about separating the male. the male also looked almost dead afterwards haha. i guess that one was a successful breeding attempt. he go under her, and stroked her legs, and they fought and stuff.

do most T. kill the male afterwards or something?

No, but sometimes it happen. The female thinks he will be a good meal and good nutrition for her now that she is gonna make babies
Sometimes the female even eats the male before anything happens. I think that would have been the case if I would let these two continue.

This breeding attempt was a failure, he never got to get close enough to her and make an insertion.

breeding Ts is scary D:

Nah, its really fun