Wow OP! I’ve heard camel spiders are incredibly difficult to breed in captivity, congratulations! If she made these eggs in captivity, I’d love to hear about your setup. I’m a professor in evolutionary developmental biology, and I use arthropod stick-outty things (wings horns helmets gills etc) to figure out how bodies evolve over huge timescales like half a billion years. I’ve been wanting to investigate those fan shaped things (malleoli/racquets) on the underside of their legs for years! But to do so, I need a steady supply of embryos, and since solfugids are so difficult to breed, that project has been on the back burner.
But if you’ve managed to breed them, then a steady supply of embryos is a possibility now!
Here is some of my work. This image is most of a Brazilian white knee tarantula embryo. The head and most of the right side of the body fell off during prep, unfortunately, but I’ve labeled “head” where the head would have been. The blue color is a nuclear dye so you can see the entire embryo. The other colors are where different genes are being expressed. For example the green socks on the legs are where the gene distal-less (Dll ) is expressed. The smaller lumps of green Dll expression in the spinnerets support the idea that spinnerets evolved from legs, which agrees with some fossil tarantulas where the spinnerets are long and multi jointed just like legs 🤓
In addition to embryos, I would need a sequenced transcriptome or genome. Do you happen to know which species of camel spider this is so I can check if one is already available?
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u/moosepuggle 11d ago
Wow OP! I’ve heard camel spiders are incredibly difficult to breed in captivity, congratulations! If she made these eggs in captivity, I’d love to hear about your setup. I’m a professor in evolutionary developmental biology, and I use arthropod stick-outty things (wings horns helmets gills etc) to figure out how bodies evolve over huge timescales like half a billion years. I’ve been wanting to investigate those fan shaped things (malleoli/racquets) on the underside of their legs for years! But to do so, I need a steady supply of embryos, and since solfugids are so difficult to breed, that project has been on the back burner.
But if you’ve managed to breed them, then a steady supply of embryos is a possibility now!