Spider poop


As promised threatened, I took some photos of spider poop this morning. It’s surprisingly colorful! But then, these are from the spiderling vials, so maybe it’s like baby poop, which also tends to have surprising colors.

The big circular feature is an artifact at the bottom of the plastic vial.

This is my masterpiece: I call it “Still life with spider poop, molted cuticle, and little blue bits of dried fly medium”. I’m thinking of printing it out on a 10 foot wide sheet and selling it to MOMA.

Comments

  1. davidc1 says

    Never seen multi coloured spider poop before ,that’s not a statement you hear people admit to .

  2. monad says

    This is from eating only flies? In vertebrates poop colors tend to reflect bile pigments, plus food that hasn’t broken down very well, which I think probably applies to babies a lot of the time. I wonder what’s responsible here. My guess would be ommochromes, which are common pigments in spiders but also are supposed to have originated as a way of eliminating tryptophan, but that’s only because I don’t know anything better.

  3. NitricAcid says

    Spider poop, spider poop, out of a spider’s butt it droops.
    It’s not a web, any size, it’s made from half-digested flies
    Look out! Here comes the spider poop…..

    (I knew I wouldn’t be the first to do that, but I couldn’t resist anyway…)