Tarantula Tuesday: Evolution 1 - Creationism 0

As some of you are no doubt aware, I have been training my tarantula to devour intruders for some time. This has been hard due to the dearth of despicable disruptors of my quiet hobbit hole. I have since undertaken a new task with Helob the Curlyhair Tarantula. I am trying to teach him to speak Swahili. Which is hard because I don't speak Swahili and mostly I just stare and him and repeat the same gibberish over and over again. This sounds rather similar to a certain blog...hmmm.

Tonight, I shall purchase more food for Helob. Hopefully, this new crop of crickets won't last long enough to feel confident chirping. I still have my secret weapons (chop sticks) and now that I have seen natural selection in action in a controlled environment, I can actively work to prevent it from happening in a favorable formula for cricket survival.

I suppose I should explain how I have seen natural selection in action. This is fairly simple. When I tossed in the crickets for the last feeding, one ran straight toward the nearest dark space. This space happened to be underneath Helob's ravenous fangs. This is not behavior that is conducive to cricket survival as this subject discovered immediately. The next morning I found two crickets hiding under the dish of mandarin orange slices I had placed in the terrarium to enrich the food for Helob. I also could not locate one cricket, thus one must have been eaten during the night. The smallest cricket spent the first two days trying to bury/dig itself into the dirt in the left, front corner. That evening and the following morning, I could only find one less cricket. Since I have observed no crickets escaping the terrarium or at large in my apartment, I must surmise that the missing crickets were consumed by the insectivorous inhabitant of the terrarium. For the next three days, the tiniest cricket continued to live in the enclosure. I had removed the dish of oranges as it had grown nasty about the time the tiniest cricket was the only surviving subject. This cricket had already unsuccessfully tried to bury itself and had now determined a technique that was optimal for surviving the tarantula's lethal ministrations.

It was hiding out on top of the half pipe hidey hole. As curlyhair tarantulas are strictly terrestrial, the cricket had found the one place in the environment where it was safe. After two more days, I pronounced evolution proven and all the cobagz can go back to school. I then used my chop sticks to prod the smart little cricket into the waiting jaws of Helob. It took less that 90 seconds to perform this task. I guess the cricket wasn't that smart after all.