…one should spend some time with one’s spiders. I know it is numerically the 10th month, but it should be the 8th month by name, if not for some silly Romans who tried to squeeze a couple more emperors into the calendar. It was feeding day anyway, so I spent a little time giving them treats in celebration.
Here’s Blue, who gobbled down her mealworm instantly, and is now dabbling her toes in her water dish.
It’s getting more difficult to photograph Blue, because she’s covering everything with silk — when you look in from the side, it’s a haze of strands everywhere, and I have to remove the lid to the terrarium to lean in and see what she’s up to.
I fed the Steatoda borealis, the Parasteatoda tepidariorum, and the Latrodectus mactans juveniles as well. I’ve isolated about 80 black widow juveniles in individual vials, and am running out of room in the incubator, so there’s about 80-100 more left in a container together, like a giant colony of black widows. It’s a Darwinian world in there — I figure I’ll let the numbers decline and then extract the biggest survivors.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the isolated individuals, in spite of getting a bounty of fruit flies twice a week, are growing more slowly than some of the black widows in the communal container. Most are small, but there’s a few that stand out as growing distinctly larger than their siblings.
(Photos were taken immediately after I dumped a lot of fruit flies into the container, so they’ve all got their faces snout deep in dinner.)
I have to speculate that maybe, just maybe, some of the spiders are eating their siblings.
Actually the mismatch between the meanings of the names of the last months of the year and their place on the calendar ISN’T because July and August were inserted into a ten-month calendar. That’s a common misconception.
The names July and August actually just replaced Quintilis and Sextilis (fifth month and sixth month), which were already by the time the Julian calendar was introduced (45BC) the seventh and eighth months.
The actual reason (or so, at least, Roman writers say) that the numbers are skewed is that the original Roman calendar (thought to be created by Romulus himself, but that’s almost certainly a legendary attribution to a culture hero) only had ten months, beginning in March at the start of the campaigning season and going through to December. The harshest part of the winter was not assigned any months and just existed as an amorphous sixty-odd day blob between years. When Romulus’s successor, Numa, took over he reformed the calendar by assigning the intercalary period to two new months, January and February, which were counted first. Thus the rest were bumped up two places. There was also the new intercalary thirteenth month – Mercedonius – which was inserted by the Pontifex Maximus whenever it was decided the political / religious year needed to be realigned with the actual passage of the seasons. This was inserted between February and March, or according to some accounts between the 23rd of February and the 24th of February.
That’s a myth btw. July and August weren’t newly inserted, just renamed from Quintilis and Sextilis.
Oh ye of little history!
The old Roman calendar started each year on 1 March (which was then the Vernal equinox, before screwing up leap-days messed it up).
Leap days were at the END of the year, as they should be. So yes, October is 8th month, November 9th, December 10th, then January 11th and February 12th.
The Roman new year got changed to 1 January because of some political fuckery (sound familiar?) to cut a consul’s six-month term by 2 months.
I, for one, fully expect that Trump abolishes the month of January, so he never has to leave office.