Yesterday, I showed you that clutch of spider eggs I’d accidentally removed from their silken egg sac. This morning I checked on them, looked into the incubator, and saw they were still resting there in a tight little ball, but when I picked up the vial, they disappeared. The coherent ball of eggs fell apart, and all the individuals went tumbling down, like little beige pearly ball bearings, and they’re rolling around on the floor of their container.
I don’t consider this a good sign — it means that they initially had some adhesive properties and that they’re drying out. Mama Spider puts a drop of mystery fluid in the egg sac as she’s laying eggs, and it’s not clear what that does for them. These eggs may be doomed. I spritzed some water vapor into the vial and also dampened the foam plug to get the humidity up, but we’ll see. I’ll be keeping an eye on them.
P.S. They’re not like chicken eggs, where a fall from 20 egg diameters up is going to crack them all. There are some privileges to being tiny.
Have you done much fiddling with the exposure, white point, ISO thingummies on your camera? Just curious about how much of a difference, at this scale, that makes for capturing light in the dark areas.
Speaking of spiders, I just finished a two-book series by Adrian Tchaikovsky – “Children of Time” and “Children of Ruin”. The first features man-made intelligent spiders while the second adds man-made intelligent octopuses. Right up your alley!