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September 28, 2004
How Not to Feed Spiders
The spiders have returned! Only this time they are covering the entrance way to my outdoor garbage area. As such I'm stock piling garbage on my patio until garbage day.
Taking Chris's suggestion, I've bought another loaf of tofu. Why? Because tofu goes bad quickly and smells rather awful when it does. No need to experiment on this one kids, trust me. Instead of feeding the spider raw tofu, I decided to get a little more adventurous with the tofu and fried it up in flavors of plain, butter+garlic, and hot sauce. Since this has become more of an effort, I decided to maintain a bit more scientific data about the even this time, try multiple variations on the same flavors, and enlist the help of my neighbor who thinks I'm rather crazy now I'm sure.
Regular tofu had a no so spectacular result. The cold version resulted in nothing being touched, but the hot version got wrapped up pretty quickly. It was still there a day later when I decided to try the butter+garlic flavored.
Butter+garlic both warm and cold disappeared. I'm not certain that it was eaten by the spider, I can't see it on the ground, and it's certainly not in the web anymore. My guess is that another animal rather liked the smell and took it.
The hot sauce flavored tofu resulted in some interesting "wrestling" in the web. After the initial toss in, the spider ran down to wrap it up, but did not seem to enjoy touching the piece. Adding in multiple other pieces exacerbated the situation I'm sure as the spider fled to the upper corner to hide. The next day the pieces were on the ground. I guess tobasco is too hot for spiders.
Posted by Dan at September 28, 2004 12:54 AM