Giant Japanese Funnel Web Pairing

hello guys welcome back to the channel now we've got a real treat for you guys today today we are gonna attempt to pair our macrotheli gigas the giant japanese funnel web spider now there is pretty much zero information about these guys within the hobby there is nothing at all so we are really in the dark with this one and um as far as i'm aware they've never been bred in this country i think there has been a couple of cases in germany um but that is about as far as i can find out they're very very few and far between and like i say there is no real documented evidence as to how we should go about this or what we should expect or anything else so as you're probably aware the the funnel webs are a spider that really really demands your utmost respect these are not to be trifled with you must be very very careful with them they're incredibly fast and i'm not fond of saying spiders are aggressive because i don't really believe that they are actually aggressive in a nasty sense of the word but these guys are very much um into looking after themselves they will not hesitate to strike out and strike out in a forceful manner so we need to be very very careful now we've got our female in here and she molted out a couple of months ago so she should in theory be ready and we have been absolutely so so lucky that one of my others has actually matured into a male now anyone within the hobby that's interested in these particular spiders will understand and know that males are they're like unicorns you just can't find them and i don't know why but there is a severe lack of males so when this guy actually matured out and i realized it was a male i was ecstatic over the moon because it meant that we could move forward with our with our breeding project so what we're going to do now the male is in here and as you see we keep our males you'll know from previous videos we keep our males in these little 20 by 20 cubes perfectly adequate makes him save his energy keeps him nice and safe and sound and our female is in this temporary enclosure i've been very keen to actually move her over but we're going to try and pair her first as you can see they do some incredible webbing so what we're going to do now is we are going to attempt to get him out of here now these are very very fast very fast and i'm not entirely sure how we're going to do this so this is all going to be a little bit new and fresh because underneath here there is a piece of bark you'll see there's an escape hole here there's another hole here and there's one up here as well um so you can see he's he's got a number of entrances that he can fly in and out of and the only way we're going to be able to get him out is to destroy his home i don't know if you can see through there but he is actually right in the front of his web here i don't think he's going to be tempted to come out but you can just about see a foot down there he's actually disappeared where has he gone now then right okay let's just see if we can get into we need to be able to get our box in so what i'm gonna do i am gonna seal off this hole here using his own web because i don't want him tearing out of this hole so we're going to seal that one off and i think what we're going to do is we are going to close this one here as well and what we're aiming for here is just a little bit of personal safety and we can do that there now don't worry about my fingers i'm very aware of what i'm doing now then as we peel this back we're peeling this moss back and as you can see under there it's all webbed up underneath and here there he is you can see him there just see his toes can you see that he's actually gone back down again there he is he's just there he's there so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull this part back there you go we can see him now there's a foot you just see a leg there as you can see there's lots of bits and pieces for him to hide in here which makes this very difficult as long as he's in the comfort of that bit of webbing we should be fine so what i'm going to do i'm going to remove remove this if i can there we go we've taken the whole thing out and what i'm going to do now is we're going to place our catch cup here the bottom of the hole here is you can see here here he comes you'll see now where they get this aggression from here's a very full-on little spider be very careful of our fingers now i think what i'm going to try and do is use the lid to maneuver him very quickly oh we have to be very careful there we go we have him right one successful catch what we'll do now is we'll put all his stuff back here we'll rearrange that sure enough notice that guys we've been very optimistic and hopeful that he actually does go back home so what we'll do now we can see him there see what impressive spider he is now i don't know if you can see on the see his pedi pouch there you can maybe see the amboli on them you notice they have a lack of tibial hooks so he's got no no tibial hooks on his legs so we're not sure now whether he's gonna pair like a true spider although these aren't true spiders or will he pair more like in the fashion of the tarantulas this is going to be an interesting thing so what we're going to do now is we're going to turn the females tank around we've managed not to disturb her and she has been on the desk here for the last 24 hours because i didn't want any real disturbance around her so we'll take that off of there and we are going to camera block to come around here now then to see in here we see with this female here she has got tunnels here another one here there's one here this is the one she uses the most so when i pop food in here she will come from back here come through and out of this hole so what we're going to do is we're going to drop our mail up here and hopefully excuse me bless you thank you and hopefully she will feel his vibrations she fed last night as did he so what we're going to hope now is that he doesn't come absolutely charging out so we've got to do this very very carefully so here we go i'm gonna do i'm gonna put him on the top here you notice he's lost his aggression let's see if we can't just get him to walk out i don't want him to have a fit i'm moving very very slowly there we go don't run little guy nice and gently does it now that didn't work out too bad or the rather he'd stayed on top of the web beggars can't be choosers now she is back here so there's a good chance she might just go along the side of the tank they might just pick each other up so as you can see this has taken roughly about 20 minutes since this male that you can see now was first put into the enclosure and he's woken up now and he looks quite determined he's definitely on the hunt now we really don't know what to expect now as i said before there is no information on the breeding of these guys here we go he's now found her main tunnel entrance there she there you just saw her legs flash on the left-hand side of him as you can see the actual footage is very very poor and this is mainly due to the amount of webbing on the glass it was so difficult to actually get a clear view of anything but what we have tried to do is try and document as much as we can and as you can just about make out through there that she is doing some very very subtle movements now they are face to face now and the female is on the left now you see this that very subtle leg shaking note the size of the fangs on the female there this is one of the things that makes these guys so dangerous now a male now as you can see he's coming out now he's come back up through a side entrance you can see his bulbous pedi palps there very very evident there as you can see she's actually soliciting him he's not showing any fear from her at the moment now this is the male on the left hand side now and the female is underneath the tunnel and you can see she's like giving these very gentle flinches very subtle he's doing the same now you see there was a slight uh interaction there from the male he obviously wasn't particularly happy about her forwardness and they stayed in this position like this for roughly about an hour a little bit of backwards and forwards and again with this very very gentle um sort of almost like a throbbing motion you see there again the male is just putting her in our place just keeping her in check she's actually laying on her side which was very unusual she's almost upside down she's laying on the side wall of the web in the tunnel as we often see with other spiders especially some of your facorial spiders the males are very very tentative because they normally end up having to do the deed in a quite a tight in you know a tight environment which doesn't allow them too much scope for escape and this was one of the things that we were really worried about these males are so hard to get a hold of i mean they really just do not become available we don't really understand why it may be the fact that the vast majority of the funnel webs that come into the hobby are wild caught and it may just be that you know it's the females at the time of year that the the collectors are going out collecting these spiders it might just be that the females are the ones that are evident at that time of year and i'm starting to think that maybe on the very few sacks that have been dropped by wild caught females that have actually hatched i think maybe that the they've been incubated at a higher temperature and this is producing females and this may explain why there's no males within the hobby now you'll notice there with the male if you look just about see his abdomen he sways his abdomen he shakes it from side to side now this is something that we often see with our true spiders the wolf spiders and things like that very very interesting behavior these guys have got traits from the true spiders and they also have traits from the tarantulas as you can see now he's quite determined he's on the move he really did get around very very active notice the huge spinnerets on these they have massive spinnerets compared to the tarantulas now you can just see her on the left hand side again there you can see her legs she's picked him up again she's moving she's now coming out towards the entrance this is her favorite entrance her favorite burrow he is facing her now you notice we're not getting the shaking that we often see with our male tarantulas they often shake we're not getting none of that with these guys so many differences this is absolutely thrilling stuff to watch hmm it looks here like he's trying to actually tempt her out he doesn't feel so confident down there here she comes now what we've seen so far is that um this female appears to be quite receptive you know she does these very sort of short sharp juddery movements i don't think we're seeing the full courtship at the moment there she comes now he's not actually although he's he's he's showing signs of um let's say a difference he's uh he's not fully committed to this breeding program although i think she she actually appears to be in fairly good condition she seems to be quite up for an interaction and you can see there he's gone all the way around the back and he's coming up the back and if you look just above the moss you can see that um you just see his leg there he is there he is here he comes he's coming through the back door let's see what this produces she's gone back in notice there i have to excuse the reflection of my hands this was such a difficult thing to try and film but you notice there that there's very subtle throbbing of her abdomen now this was continuous the whole time the whole time that she was within interaction with the male she done this throbbing motion again these are all subtle little signs that we need to be looking for these are all telling a story they all give us giving us an indication of how things are and what in what direction they're going and this gives us the um the confidence that we can leave them together and allow them to trying to try and breed and as you can see now the male has come back he's come out and he faces her and then he literally just turns his back on her and walks away which in some respects shows a confidence with the male he doesn't feel threatened by her she's got them very subtle movements she's trying to entice him all the time notice now he's webbing up this is something that we've seen throughout the whole process that as he walks around he is constantly laying webb down now is this because this is like a lifeline so in the case of him actually having to take off in a hurry he can follow these webs almost like he's leaving a bread trail he's given her a little bit of a run around because she's not quite sure where to go but one of the things that's been very very evident with this attempt is that all the information that we could find and people that we spoke to said that they have a very aggressive um stance regarding the breeding process and we've seen the opposite here we've seen our very very subtle very gentle you notice now they're almost in a tarantula pose now and at this point i actually thought we were going to get a successful insemination now both raised up and it was looking rather rather hopeful here and who knows we might have even got an insemination here but we just couldn't see it there you see that little stab was that him telling her enough is enough don't be so pushy or did he actually manage to inseminate her because on some of the spiders as we've seen in the past sometimes a very quick jab is all it takes a split second and it's over and done with the only thing that suggests that maybe he was just putting her in her place is the fact that they're still there i would have thought if he'd actually inseminated he would have took off i have to excuse that drilling in the background my neighbor now we seem to have come to a little bit of a stamina you see she's um she's soliciting again amazing how high up she is you'll see her fangs there and he is way down low is there something going on behind that web oh if only we knew this is an absolute jigsaw of a of a puzzle to try and unravel but what an opportunity as we said in the beginning the males are incredibly difficult to find we don't really know why now what we've seen here in um in this in this short video we've tried to put the clips together that are actually showing the interactions as you can see here now this is the female here and she's re-webbing up the tunnel and this is something we saw a lot of as the mail wandered off she would then in process get on with the housekeeping and she would start webbing up notice those huge spinnerets you'll also see there that the web she's laying down is very very thick it's like a blanket of web she's almost sealing off the tunnel and she's done this all the time whereas the male laid a fine web almost like a lifeline you can see there a large sheet of webbing that she's uh she's spreading over the tunnel fantastic weber's these guys absolutely fantastic i think today we've seen a totally different side these are a fascinating spider and as we've seen not as aggressive and terrible as one would first imagine they are made out to be the stuff of nightmares but i think we've shown a very different and subtle side to these guys here she comes back into a favorite part of her lair yeah right then so we've had a bit of interaction but i think what we're going to do is we're going to move him out and um because i don't want to leave them cohabiting at this moment he doesn't seem quite ready although she is so i think what we're going to do is we're going to try and try and get him out there we go it's as easy as that i'm going to put the lid back on here all right what we're going to do now is we're going to put him back in his original enclosure and i think what we'll try and do is cool him off a little so here we go this is where he might just run a nice out from above again once again nice and gently and try and get him to move we don't want to fluster him it's nice and gentle you notice we're not getting any aggression nice and slow bearing in mind in this small enclosure if he was to run up the back he'd be straight out so we have to keep things very slow and gentle cracking spider isn't he get the lid back on is a massive thing with these guys don't want too much and he's back in and it was all nice and simple wasn't it so that was good so as we said in the beginning these guys do demand your utmost respect they have got by all intents and purposes a very very strong venom and this is not something you want to get bitten by but as we've shown there although they are capable of delivering a very nasty bite if handled correctly and nice and gently as we've shown here we didn't actually see too much aggression from these guys considering what a terrible reputation these have and yet we managed to take him out of there we saw a little bit of aggression while he was inside his inside his web but we still managed to get him out without him having an absolute fit so he left his own enclosure into the cricket tub into her enclosure you notice how he moved out nice and gently into her enclosure and he stayed calm the whole time now um at the footage that we've got there it's very very shaky footage and it's very difficult to actually try and film this this breeding attempt because the glass is covered in web and everything else so it's hard to focus on different things but i think we saw a little bit of interesting stuff there she was obviously reasonably well she seemed pretty receptive to be fair and he's a little bit jumpy so i think what we're going to do we're going to cool him off for a week and then we'll try these again next weekend and we'll see where we go there but i think we've uh i think we've managed to show a different side to these funnel webs today and um yeah fingers crossed there is no information on these so fingers crossed we're we're going to persevere and we'll see where it leads us this could all be a whole brand new thing right well i hope you enjoyed that and do keep an eye out for the future video because we will be doing these again next week um we will try and pair them again next week so uh until then don't forget be calm be gentle and love your spider and i'll see you again soon guys you

Channel: Dave's Little Beasties

Views: 2,291,327

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Id: gPDNs7jvf8I

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021