u/batata_dahorinha

In college, my professors told me that you can't pin spiders because they're soft and that I should just leave them in alcohol to preserve them, but spiders that are in alcohol lose their color and look strange, WHY is that? In my research, the abdomen dries out, shrinks, and starts to rot, but I've seen people in different places saying that you can remove the organs and replace them with stuffing. I understand that it's probably not possible to do that with small spiders, but still, I see places like the American Museum of Natural History saying that spiders are not suited to drying and pinning, and I wanted to know why.

I also saw some places saying that you can't pin the cephalothorax and I dont understand why either.

I don't want colleges to change the whole way they store spiders. This whole line of thinking came about because there's a very small natural history museum inside my college, and the spider section is just lame.

all the spiders are on alcohol or whatever, and some spiders, like the brown recluse, are fucking white, like literally white, you can't see the violin at all, there's also a tarantula that, to say the least, has certainly seen better days.

Sorry for using Google Translate.