She had an assistant called Selvan and
he followed her instructions, keeping the records and making the
notings in a log book.
During the fortnight that I worked with Dr Vijayalakshmi, I simply
slipped into this set-up, reading books about spiders that Dr
Vijayalakshmi gave me, then learning to identify different spiders and
simultaneously helping Selvan in all the tasks that were needed to
maintain the huge spider population housed in the garage.
The spiders that Dr Vijayalakshmi deals with are called giant crab
spiders. These spiders do not build webs. They feed only on
cockroaches. The spiders were a little smaller than their prey i.e. the
cockroaches. I used to separate the babies, feed them, check the
moultings and catch flies for feeding them. I read a lot of books here
and sometimes caught the spiders in the garden in order to identify and
study them.
Spiders were not the only creatures housed in the garage. There were
also cockroaches bred in buckets with rolled cardboard in the centre
and broken biscuit pieces thrown in the bucket. The cockroaches were
fed once a week or so to the giant crab spiders.
The smaller spiders used to get flies to eat and these were caught by
us everyday from the garden. The flies have to be fed alive to the
spiders, so we used transparent plastic bottles to trap the flies and
once caught we would carefully put them into the spider's bottle.
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