I am a cruel and terrible spiderlord. I have just been overwhelmed with these black widows, which are awesomely fertile. The two adults I have just produced two more egg sacs! There’s a hundred spiderlings in each, and every few weeks another sac erupts and produces a spiderling swarm! I have limited capacity to incubate the horde (although I am getting another incubator from a colleague soon), and also, these are black widows — I have to be careful to prevent any escapes onto campus.
My horrible solution so far is to take advantage of the fact that I have the mothers in a large cage with lots of room for the sprawling horde, and I go in and scoop out a lucky few spiderlings to live in separate vials, and, terrible as it sounds, leave the rest to die. Or maybe die. I’m a softie, so I do shake out a bunch of fruit flies into the container — but not enough to feed a population of hundreds. I figured that eventually they’d winnow down to manageable numbers without any intervention on my part.
I did not take cannibalism into account.
What I’m seeing is that there’s an unexpected distribution of spiderling sizes. The majority are tiny, some are getting large, and a few are getting to sub-adult size. What are they eating? Sure, I’m throwing in some fruit flies, but not really enough to plump up a lot of adults. Therefore, the bully spiderlings must be killing and eating their smaller peers, and growing to a larger size that allows more bullying and sibling murder. Conceptually, it’s a bit horrific.
Today I broke down and decided to distract the bigger spiderlings with a larger, non-conspecific meal, and gave them some mealworms.
The mealworm is in the center, and looming over it with a massive leg span is the young Flashman of this mob, dining on this lovely non-arachnid flavored meal. You can also see the cloud of small juveniles all over the place.
This is not my ideal solution. In the future, I’d like to isolate each egg sac as they’re produced, and control the population more precisely, but I can’t do that now. There’s a new egg sac in this container right now, but it’s in the middle of a tangle of sticky cobwebs, guarded by a fierce mama spider, and to get to it I’d have to stick my hand into this scurrying mass of spiderlings. I’m not worried about getting bitten, but more concerned that I have to make sure no one escapes.
I am aware that this is actually a good problem for an evil spiderlord to have.
Will they eat the dried mealworms that are available as birdfeed?
Ugh, no, they need their meat juicy.
Juicy… will they eat the stuff from a liposuction? I have enough to keep a million spiders alive.
What could possibly go wrong?
Seems like the number one problem would be that then you’d have a million spiders, which. Damn. I mean I like spiders as much as the next guy, even if the next guy is PZ, but that just sounds hella inconvenient.
Excess spiders? That Kennedy feller likes animals, he will be delighted when you empty a huge container full of spiders into his house.
Why does this remind me of the “All Hail Kay” scene in Men In Black?
PZ, can’t you find a way to kill them quickly? Being eaten is so cruel!
I’ve tried anesthetizing the flies, but the spiders ignore them until they wake up and start to move.
I’m sure the mealworm did not suffer. It was rendered immobile and comatose by venom, and doesn’t have a limbic cortex and nervous system that feels pain or emotions like mammals.
Everything dies and becomes food for something else.
Sounds like that anime, “So I’m a Spider, So What?”
As they say in Jurassic Park – “Life finds a way.” Quite often a really disturbing, gross (to us) way like cannabalism, parasitism, ad nauseam..
StevoR @ 12
Speaking of cannibalism, that is why female bears with cubs tend to move a bit closer to human habitation, something bears otherwise avoid. Their priority is to avoid adult male bears.
BTW the ‘life finds a way’ actor will be playing an Olympic god. They were a nasty bunch.
@ ^ birgerjohansson : I remember reading about cannabalism with dinosaurs – specifically Coelophysis – in an old dinosaur book as a kid before they put it on Walking with Dinosaurs although I gatehr there’s been some recent debate on that – see ‘Was This Dinosaur a Cannibal?’ by PBS Eaons. 12 mins
A mellow biology professor managing a seemingly harmless Latrodectus Park burgeoning in a nondescript college building just as students have come back to campus? This needs to be serenaded by a John Williams piece slowly building to a crescendo as background music.
Imback @ 15
…And it should be filmed with ‘dutch angels’ to emphasise the creepiness. The professor is played by a clone of Klaus Kinski.
I milked 1000 spiders to make guitar strings!!