Tara, our visiting tarantula, gets fed a single cricket or mealworm a month, making her feeding feel like quite the event.
I dutifully went to pet store tonight to buy a cricket.
“Large or small?” the store employee asked.
“It’s for a tarantula,” I said. “What do you recommend?”
“Large,” she said knowingly, as if she’d done this before.
She also told me there’d be no charge for my single cricket. Remarkably affordable pets, tarantulas are.
I brought my cricket home and set it loose in the cage, then watched eagerly to see what would happen.
The cricket crawled under a bit of bark, the tarantula crawled on top of it, and … that was it.
Since then, tarantula and cricket have both moved about a bit–the cricket is hidden behind a fake leaf now–but they seem entirely unaware of each other, and content to go on living their separate lives that way.
Somehow, one gets the sense this well-balanced state of affairs cannot last indefinitely.
If a small web appears in the cage reading “SUM KRIKET” you’ll know this has gone off the rails entirely.
(falls over laughing)