Time for my weekly spider measuring event. The young’uns molted again, and once again, they’ve grown some more.
It’s a fairly steady pattern, as I might have expected. They eat, they get bigger. There’s a fair amount of variability there, and I’ll post a couple of photos of the spider on Patreon to illustrate that.
I’ve got another egg sac close to hatching, but as usual, Steatoda triangulosa is taking its sweet time. The data so far is a rough outline with data taken at weekly intervals — it’s clear that I need to do more frequent sampling to get a better picture of how pigment patterns develop, but these guys are not in any hurry to get under my microscope. It won’t hurt, I promise!
Can you anesthetize spiders by popping them in the fridge like you can flies?
This evening I watched a daddy longlegs (the actual spider variety) dealing with a fly caught in its web in the window pane of the back door. It didn’t seem very good at it. Then it did something rather amazing. The web itself was like a curtain of gauze hanging down, and the fly was at the lower edge. Once it had the fly mostly subdued, it began to roll the damn sheet of webbing up like a rug and made off with the whole thing to another dusty corner somewhere.