Fox & Phids

08/21/2024

Ok yall! Getting ready for my gathering this sat from 12:00-5:00pm. These are all the babies up for Ad0pt!ion. In addition I will also have 12 smaller babies which I have not named yet that will be in deli cups as well as slings. All the juveniles and sub adults in the photos here will come in an 8oz enclosures which I just made today. If you would like to swing by you will need to message me for the location.

08/06/2024

Ok yall! August 24th will be having my little expo from 12:00pm -5:00pm. Due to scammers on Facebook I can not post my address publicly therefore you need to message me privately or email me at [email protected] and I will put you on a list. Thats the only safe way to have this mini expo. Please know that I will research you to make sure you have a valid fb profile.

Here is what will be offered.
Limited 4x4x4 inch enclosures $30 (normally $50)
Limited 5x5x5 inch enclosures $45 (normally $65- $75)
I5-i6 babies in deli cups $25
i8-subadult females all in handmade enclosures $45 (normally $55-$60) regardless of color! $35 without enclosure.
i8 -subadult males all in handmade enclosures $35 (normally $45) $25 without enclosure.
Spray bottles & fruit fly condiment bottles for taking care of babies may be available.

All spiders are captive bred and captive raised regal jumping spiders and have all been handled.

Provided a picture of one of my babies and a picture of the enclosures that the spiders will come in should you choose to keep them in it. All enclosures are handmade with cork bark, flower heads, reptile safe moss, hand drilled ventilation holes and a fake fern leaf. They thrive in these enclosures and can stay in them till adult hood.

Hope to hear from you! And will be posting pictures of all available babies prior to the 24th. If it rains or is too hot a rain date will be TBD. These prices are one day only same as any expo and you must attend to receive the prices.

07/06/2024

Hi all! These are my available babies. Molts range from i6-i8. Local pick up in Naugatuck is available. I also ship within USA only. FedEx Overnight live arrival guarantee and 2day FedEx live arrival not guaranteed. I only ship on Tuesdays “weather permitting”. All my babies are captive bred and raised and all of them have been handled. If you see a baby you want you always place a non refundable d€p0s!t of “tw€nty” via apps per photos provided at end . Please put your name and the spider you want. Otherwise PM me for more details. Prices vary

06/26/2024

Date TBD but I will be having a pop up shop for one day only in Naugatuck CT. All my regal jumping spiders will up for adoption at a reduced adoption fee. I will have 8oz handmade enclosures for juveniles and I will also be doing a raffle for a spider and a handmade enclosure. I do not like doing the expos and running a website is just exhausting having a full time job. So I thought this would be a great way to have people come out pick your spider, avoid FedEx shipping fees. Once I figure out the logistics I will post date and time! Prob won’t be till it gets a littler cooler. But I have some VERY impressive babies all of them look like hot Cheetos 😂

06/25/2024

Lindsay Elliott this is my page

06/21/2024

Facebook is so annoying! Do people on here just all wake up on the wrong side of the bed and just never sleep on the right side ever again.

06/09/2024

Basics of Baby Regal Jumping spider Care:

Moms will have multiple sacs even up to 6. So be prepared for the mom to continue to lay till the end of her life.

Mom will lay an egg sack and stay tucked in her nest, providing a temperature controlled environment till the babies hatch. The eggs will turn yellow sometimes orange in color.

babies will turn black will emerge. A they will stay close to the sac at first as they eat the infertile eggs that mom lays as a food source. You do not need to take out the egg sack until the babies have ventured to the very edges of the nest. That is when you know the babies are about to emerge.

Mom seals the nest edges so the babies can’t get out but when they get old enough to start eating they will chew their way out this is why when they get to the edge you know any day now babies will be coming out.

If you don’t remove them at that time, they will emerge into the enclosure and then it’s very very hard to give Mom water and also they will escape through the air holes of your enclosure so it’s important that you take them out at the very moment you see them hanging out at the edges of that nest.

Take mom out temporarily then take a pair of long tweezers and water, wet the tip of your tweezers and rub the edges of the nest to loosen the edges aka “anchors” and you should be able to pull the egg sack out in one shot. His mom has created a nest. That is very hard to get to. I take scissors  and gently tap the edges of the nest to make the babies move out of the way and then I cut the nest away from the area. Once you have fully loosened the nest, you should be able to pull it out safely without harming the babies, if this is not at all possible, put the entire enclosure into a butterfly mesh habitat and keep the top open of your enclosure. That should be a last resort though because it is an absolute pain.

Relocate the nest to a 32oz deli container with a vented lid and poke air holes in it with a pin. You can get the vented lid deli cups on Amazon.

 the babies will take a minute to emerge, so in the meantime, get yourself some melanogastor fruit fly cultures.  also, I would highly suggest ordering the Josh's Frogs Melanogaster Fruit Fly Culture Kit from Amazon to continue to make cultures to save money. Also you will need a funnel and a plastic condiment bottle like for ketchup, you can get the condiment bottles at the dollar store.

Get your self a micro spray bottle as well and fill it with bottled spring water or distilled NEVER TAP.

Once the babies start to emerge, you will want to put your funnel into your plastic condiment bottle. Put your fruit flies in the fridge for 20 minutes then tap the fruit flies out into the funnel and you’ll want to spray the fruit flies into your 32 ounce container “sometimes you have to cut the top of the condiment bottle”. You’re gonna do this every couple of days no more than every 3 days.

Spray the deli cup every day but hold the spray bottle at least a foot or more above the deli this will keep the droplets micro and avoid drowning the babies. If the droplets are too big, because your spider breathe from its abdomen aka book lungs, they can drowned very easily.

 once your spiders start to get white markings on them, they should be around their 4th molt. That is when you’re going to want to separate them out do not separate them out too early they do better communal. The only time you want to separate them right away is if you noticed that you have a clutch that happens to be extremely cannibalistic otherwise leave them together they are going to eat each other here and there. It is part of nature and you want the strong to survive.

When you separate them out, get 5oz deli cups poke pinholes in all of them hot glue, some cork bark and a fake flower head in there and then mark on your deli cup when they hatched and who the Mom is because when you adopt these out later you’re a doctors are going to want to know when they hatched.

Once you separate them out into their own deli cups, you are going to want that move them up to Hyedi fruit flies and then move them up to house or blue bottle flies or if you have them you can do baby meal worms “I don’t feed meal worms”

I will be making a full video on how to take care of babies and posting it here when I’m able to edit it.

Tip! I recommend buying the DALTACK 5-Tier Letter Tray Paper Organizer this will hold about 50 5oz deli cups and the mesh wiring allows you to place them near a window and get natural light or place a light on top

06/07/2024

Gemma: “Adopted”
Craig & Rya -Possible adoption 6/8

These i6/i7 babies are ready for adoption. Shipping on Tuesdays only within the USA, and local pickup is available. Shipping FedEx only overnight with live arrival guaranteed and 2 day shipping live arrival NOT guaranteed. I will not hold babies and no refunds if you back out at the last minute. I apologize for the strict rules but I can no longer be as flexible. The babies are captive bred NOT wild caught and have been handled. Please do not ask for pictures of the parents as I do not have any since moms are usually tucked in their hammocks for most of their mom life and I do not push them out for pictures. First come first serve, please contact me via messenger for more information. I do have a ton more i4-i5 babies and bulk adoptions are available. Pictures of the other babies will come as soon as they molt into i6. I take cash app, venmo, PayPal and zelle.

05/19/2024

Hi all!!!

I have lots of Regal babies that I will be posting pictures of next weekend. Seem to have more orange females this time around. I also have 3 subadult/adult male fartilis I’ll be posting pics of as well. So stay tuned for pics of the babies!!!

04/30/2024

I’m going to talk about 2 controversial topics that may rub some breeders the wrong way but I don’t care and I’ll continue to talk about it. I may have said this before but I started this hobby way before owning jumping spiders was even a thing and I rarely ever boast about it or even divulge how long I have been doing this. There were a very very small group of us, hardly any information out there and basically we were all left with learning as we went. There are 2 things that I have been witnessing more and more and it drives me absolutely mad. First let’s talk about ego. To become a breeder you did not have to obtain a PHD and you started where most people started and that’s with little to no knowledge. You had to self teach your self or maybe you had a friend who taught you along the way. Fun fact: there’s many of you that came to me for advice or watched my tutorial videos back in the day so…. Regardless you started out like everyone else as a beginner. Being a keeper or a breeder of anything does not make you superhuman, doesn’t make you better than anyone and certainly doesn’t warrant the ego and arrogance that I have seen run rampant through this hobby. Y’all need to check yourselves and remember where you started. Next let’s talk about colors. When I started breeding there was one species of Regal and coloration would vary based on just nature or geographical location and that’s it; there was never ever fancy names for them. Like dragons breath, amber moon, citrus frost yeah they didn’t exist. Each mom regardless of color would produce a wide variety of colors. Then you would take one that was orange or dark and breed those and yes you would get maybe more of the same. We called them phase (orange phase, dark phase, peach phase) I have no issues with making up morph names the reptile community does it all the time but can we at least be consistent. Breeders just making up their own fancy names and charging $100 for them and then unsuspecting customer speak about their regal as if their regal is some rare species. At the end of the day they are still regals. So all I’m gonna say is if you want to pay $100+ for a regal with a cool color absolutely do it but remember it’s still just a regal, it won’t live longer or have special super powers 😂. It has gotten to the point where I don’t even like being in this hobby anymore. I continue to keep my stock very small so I can focus on handling all my babies, focus on health of the babies and focus on helping my customers learn. That is my choice. What I won’t do however is treat anyone like I am better than you and I will NOT be offering my spiders with some ridiculous name and price attached other than just an actual name like “brad” which I have to do to tell them apart. 😂😂😂. End of rant.

04/27/2024

Hi y’all, not a spider post but I have a robo hamster named Hank. I got him back in Nov of 2023 as a foster situation and I was planning on spending a ton of time with him hoping to be able to tame him as robos need lots of time and patience. Then I got a new job which has proved to be very time consuming and all my momma spiders laid egg sacs at the same time. Hank is still quite young “under a year” and super cute but I really feel like he would do better in a place where someone has the time to spend with him. I am not offering my nightangel for free however he will come with a 20 long and accessories and I’m not asking for an adoption fee just a good home. So please share or if interested message me! He will obv stay with me if I can’t find him a home but putting my feelers out.

04/05/2024

Update!! I’m holding all my farty babies till I can 100% tell they will a) survive and b) tell s*x so for now I have none avail

03/01/2024

Otiosis baby making

02/19/2024

I am not one to rant on here but something happened to me the other day and I can’t stop thinking about it. I have been raising and breeding regal jumping spiders for 6 years, way before the hobby was as big as it is today. I had no one to really help me in the beginning and it was a learn as you go type thing: as most people in the hobby were learning them self. Now skip to 2023. I acquired a Paraphidippus fartilis, but not without asking everyone I could about care. I loved her so much I wanted nothing more than to allow her to have babies (really for myself to keep) so I found a male from somewhere else. Before I did that I had multiple conversations with the girl that I got the male from (who is amazing) and also spend hours trying to research. There is not much out there on the species let alone sling care. So I took the knowledge I had and decided to pair them. It was successful and that was the easy part. These babies are extremely hard to raise. They are so small that even the micro of water droplet can drown them but they need lots of water. Like 2-3 times a day of watering. So I moved them into a bioactive which was great. but then came feeding….they have an extremely hard time eating because even the melanogastor fruit flies are too big. So I did lose handful which was devastating but I was on a mission to learn more. So I decided to reach out to the person I acquired my female from and asked if she could give me any tips for successfully raising them. Wow! I was not prepared for the response. Before I get to that, I will make one thing clear. I am not in this for the money, this is not my full time job and I certainly have a hard time even calling what I do a business because the work is so much more than any reward. I have said this over and over, the money I put into my spiders, I make a little extra to put back into them and that’s it. I love raising babies and it keeps me busy during my fiancés long work schedule 9 months a year. I am not looking to take over the hobby, be better, or make more $ than anyone out there. I keep my breeding program fairly small so that I can spend the time with my customers and be available for support for the life of that spider. I was just looking for some help and help is not what I got. I was so shook over the nasty response and how she ended her email with she doesn’t share secrets. Secrets??? Is that what this hobby has become. A special sauce, a patented product, a new invention. These are little lives we’re dealing with not dollar signs. As much as I can appreciate that maybe this person cracked the code of raising a difficult species and wants to make sure the cash flows strictly into her, I still can’t understand the hostility I was welcomed with. I was genuinely looking for guidance. I spend hours a day helping other people where I can and providing tutorials on ways that I have found worked best for keeping feeders or what worked best with my regals. I don’t gatekeep care for a living thing. So yeah I’m very disappointed on the arrogance and mean girl mentality in this hobby. So I have been doing my own experiments with breeding even smaller fruit flies and have been some what successful and if I crack the code, I will absolutely share what works and what doesn’t because I am a decent human. End of rant…..

10/16/2023

Hi all! So all previous posts of babies, fyi I no longer have. I will have to update those posts. These are available girls and yes that’s all I have are girls which is so odd usually I have tons of Boi’s. I do not have pictures of the parents so respectfully please do not ask 😂. They are i6 and no I do not remember the exact hatch date. I have hundreds of spiders at a time and honestly with life happening and my dog passing I stopped keeping track. It’s first come first serve on adoptions I will no longer hold babies for anyone too many people ask me to hold one and then ghost me I don’t have the time with winter coming I only have a few ship dates left. Message me with the baby you are interested in adopting. All come with 8oz enclosures. Meal worms and a spray bottle

08/24/2023

These babies are adopted

07/26/2023

Available phid johnsoni

07/18/2023

07/17/2023

Spider baby news! 

I have 11 female regal jumping spider babies. i6-i7

3 male regals same age as females

14 phid Johnsoni

I have not had a chance to take photos of all of them as I have a new puppy know how that goes I should be taking pictures between Wednesday and Friday hopefully I can post to my website this weekend otherwise private message me.

Foxandphids.com 

Live Regal Jumping Spiders for sale

06/19/2023

I have lots of babies regals and phid johnsonis that will be posted to my website at the end of July. I will be giving huge discounts on all my jumpers if you guys can get Jumpy_Jawbreakers to 1k followers on Instagram by July 29th.

Females will be offered for $25 and males $20. But we have to get her to 1k. She gave me a gecko and I want to give back. This is my way to give back. Please help share her post and follow.

06/17/2023

Hi my spider people, I don’t ask for much but aside from spiders I have crested geckos I recently got one from jumpy jawbreakers she has the cutest gecks and she’s awesome! If you wouldn’t mind giving her a share and follow on insta I want to get her to 1,000 followers by her birthday! If she gets to 1,000 followers I will offer a very nice discount on all my jumpers that I’ll be posting on my website. But we have to get her to 1,000 first. Please help!

05/10/2023

I was reading some posts in various spider groups and it had me thinking. Seems there are still a lot of people who don’t know about adopting jumping spiders from people who collect them “wild” in the field and adopt them out. So I’m gonna make this post in hopes to bring light to the situation and save some people from surprise babies. This hobby has grown substantially, there are people that live in areas where certain species of jumping spiders are native and they go out and by what ever means, they pluck them from the wild and offer them up for adoption. Then there are people who got one of those spiders, raised the babies and offer them up for adoption. Lastly there are people who pair their female and male together. This can be done ethically or not. By that I mean, there are people who cross breed and Inbreed and then there are those who care about the health and breed responsibly. Lastly amongst all those people; there are nice people and then there are not so nice people. If you want a jumping spider you will need to find out which ones of these people you are buying from. How do you do that? You ask questions and do your due diligence, you read the fine print, you search for reviews. Anything in your power to find out what type of spider you are about to get and who you are getting them from. Too many people are still posting about being surprised that their spider laid eggs and now they have to deal with babies or how horrible someone shipped their spider or how horrible the person was to deal with. This can be prevented by asking questions. If they don’t answer “move on” don’t purchase from them. There are many great, ethical breeders or people who raise babies out there that are amazing people, and it’s easy to find out who they are. Join groups, look at jumping spider breeder review groups, ask questions in those groups. If you just go blindly into getting one impulsively there is a extremely high chance you will get a older gravid female or an older male. I would say in my experience 99% of Wild caught females will have fertile eggs. They will lay one sac, then another and another and another and you will be raising babies for well into 2 years. Rasing babies is not for everyone. I have said this so many times…It’s a full time job, it’s expensive, and sometimes it’s exhausting mentally. There are a lot of people out there that adopting jumping spiders is like offering a product. They do not care about packing correctly, and don’t like dealing with customers. Then there are those like me…who genuinely care about every baby I adopt out and every customer I adopt to. So just be careful. That’s all…

05/07/2023

So I am doing a calendar for 2024 doing giveaways for my TikTok with my critters I am missing October and November but wanted to give everyone a sneak peak

04/23/2023

Oscar and Clyde are still available for adoption. Oscar is a flirt btw. They are posted on my website please message me for details. They do come with a small enclosure.

04/23/2023

This is the last girl I have available. She’s was in her web when I was posting avail babies and I didn’t want to disturb her. She’s an i6/i7 very curious and energetic. I have not posted her on my website yet and will be shipping Tuesday. So pm me if interested in adopting this girl. I have 2 more boys I’ll be posting also.

04/16/2023

Phid Johnsoni baby. These guys should be ready in a few months.

04/16/2023

I have gotten so many questions about the bottle flies On where to get them and how to hatch them and why bottle flies and not meal worms or crickets.

So I figured I would just provide all the information you need in one post.

I switched over to bottle flies from meal worms about a year and a half ago. My boys were not good eaters which is common. Boys just think about the ladies all day and sometimes they just stop eating which is heart breaking. I had bottle flies anyway from my praying mantis and I threw some in all of my adult enclosures and it was a game changer. Not only do the flies stimulate hunting response but my boys just don’t pass down a fly buzzing around their enclosure. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with feeding jumping spiders mealworms and I understand not everyone wants to keep flies in their house. Most logical humans would like to get flies out of their house LOL.

But I did notice my boys were healthier and weirdly enough living longer I have a boys right now hatched in 2021 still going strong and I have one boy that’s will be 3 in May. I can’t say for sure if the longevity is just a coincidence but it’s a pretty striking coincidence.

Now full transparency! If I don’t have bottle flies and am in a pinch I will feed meal worms and some eat them some don’t. So I’m not against feeding them.

However there are just things that I’m not a big fan of with meal worms. For one they can bite your spider if they’re left in the enclosure. The other thing is if you have substrate and the meal worm digs itself into the substrate it will turn into a beetle now when the beetle emerges your spider may or may not eat that beetle. However this seems to freak a lot of people out and all of a sudden one day they just find a beetle in the enclosure.

One last question I get asked often is do you feed crickets the answer to that is no never. In my opinion the only safe way to feed crickets to anything is to buy them from a reputable breeder these local pet stores keep them in very bad conditions and I have had those large chain pet store crickets give my praying mantis parasites. Ordering from a reputable breeder you need to order many and I just cannot keep them alive and when they die they smell and then crickets also bite so I just stay away from crickets all together.

At the end of the day it is up to you on what you are comfortable feeding BUT! If you want to try bottle flies here is what you will you do.

Go to this link it’s the order of 100 bottle fly pupae. Add to cart

https://www.mantisplace.com/product-page/blue-bottle-fly-pupae-100

VERY IMPORTANT! When you check out the website defaults to mantis shipping with is $44 dollars, so not chose this option. Though I have had the best luck with bottle flies from this website it’s not exactly user-friendly so choose the shipping supply option and then upon check out for some weird reason the website also makes you type in your shipping option so just type in shipping supplies and then check out

You have 2 options on how you want to hatch them. You can take 2 pupae out and place in bottom of the enclosure but you have a 50/50 chance of it hatching because not every pupae will hatch. Your best option is to buy the cup o flies.

Cup o flies can be found here and the directions are also provided in the listing, this comes with everything you need for housing the flies

https://www.mantisplace.com/product-page/1-cup-o-fly

I have a TikTok tutorial on how I hatch my flies and this is a method in which I have experimented with over time and one that works best for me.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR3sYyHw/

If you do not have TikTok I also uploaded you you tube:
https://youtu.be/4wiQAyxp_Os

I hope this answers all the questions you have. I have been raising babies and caring for adults for 4 years, and it’s times I failed that I had to change up my methods so any advice I give is just from personal experience I’m no expert lol.

I have experimented with many methods of hatching a bottle flies and this is the one that works the best for me

04/09/2023

Ok all babies have been posted to foxandphids.com

Some things to note: All of my babies come with a hand made enclosure. This includes a piece of cork bark “doesn’t mold”, hand drilled air holes for proper ventilation, various pieces of decor (flowers, resin mushrooms, artificial fern leaf) alll of which are there to provide anchor points for their web. The bottom screws off and is easy to clean if need be. **pictures included*
I also provide meal worms to hold you over and a spray bottle for misting.

This means that you will not need to relocate these babies for a little while. They are established in there and have their webbys all built. PLEASE do not relocate them for at least a few weeks if you choose to do so. They need time to adjust.

Also all by babies are packed in newspaper. Someone was offended that I used newspaper and not something More aesthetically pleasing. Well I am more about function over fashion. Newspaper is breathable, it’s Recyclable, and It packs them in tightly to absorb shock. So while it may not be pretty, it’s what I like to use.

Lastly, my adoption 🍩🍩 have gone up and this is due to prices of everything going up and also that I am providing the enclosure. I will not ship them without the enclosure that they are in this is my preference the spiders are happy they are healthy they are eating they are drinking and I am not about to move them out of their enclosure in a deli cup to save a few 🍩🍩.

I do have a bunch more babies that will be ready over the summer. I will have johnsoni’s and regals. Right now they are just to young to adopt out as I prefer to make sure they are established and s*xed before they leave me.
Please let me know if you have any other questions the babies are on my website and ready to be adopted.

And if you want to see these babies on a live please follow me at Melissa’s Critters on Tiktok I will be doing a showcase of them tomorrow evening around 6pm EST

04/09/2023

Update: Sunny is adopted!

I did not get a chance to post these on my website yet I had a emergency with our discus tank and needed to deal with that today but I did take photos! These are the avail Juvis, hope to post them tomm or Monday at lunch.