I’ve been experimenting with feeding regimens for the spiders. What I’ve been doing is feeding twice a week with an excess of fruit flies until I feel like they’re big enough for mealworms. My feelings about their readiness for larger food are not reliable, and lately I’ve been seeing that these spiders are eager to hunt big game. Maybe I’ve been underestimating them.
So I lined up 15 containers with juvenile black widows, ranging from little guys about 5mm long to roughly twice that, and put a mealworm in each one. Then I left them alone, going to a meeting for an hour. I came back to a horrible sight.
Mealworms are like the cows or sheep of the invertebrate feedstock. They are quiet grazers that eat our vegetable scraps and don’t move very fast. I came back to all these containers of frantic, squirming, wiggling worms, they were writhing, flailing as if in agony. The spiders, even the smallest, were darting in to deliver small bites. A full grown spider would inject enough venom to kill quickly, within minutes, but these little fellows required multiple attacks to get a slow kill. It was ugly, and I felt sorry for the worms.
I came back the next day. All of them were dead, but in various states of digestion, from drained to blackening. My little carnivores are fierce and ruthless.
I’m going to have to change up my feeding schedule, switching from Drosophila, which are apparently little more than quick snacks to them, to mealworms as soon as they’ve got fangs big enough to puncture the cuticle. I should be able to cut back feeding from twice a week to once a week. I’ll just have to swallow my guilt.
Does this make you Clarice or Lector?
Pink Floyd, ‘Waiting for the Worms,’ now stuck on repeat in my head.
“Well, Clarice, are the flamingos still screaming?”
—V,
Cyberpunk 2077
Poor juvenile black widows. Nobody likes them. Everybody hates them. Might as well…
Apparently, since swarming velociraptors no longer capture the public’s attention, we should all watch spiders feeding instead. (And yes, that’s PZ’s broadly-interpreted home town. One wonders if he has… influence… oh, wait, the Discovery Institute is still in town, too, so not so much.)
Spider cam, spider cam,
The internet says yes you can.
fishy, too good! :)
—
So as not to waste a comment on a mere compliment,
https://redbackspider.com/redback-spider-black-widow-australian-death-match/
Hey PZ, why don’t you study meal worms and feed them spiders?
Interesting…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26562-8.pdf
↓
Molecular architecture of black widow spider
neurotoxins
Latrotoxins (LaTXs) are presynaptic pore-forming neurotoxins found in the venom of Latrodectus spiders. The venom contains a toxic cocktail of seven LaTXs, with one of them targeting vertebrates (α-latrotoxin (α-LTX)), five specialized on insects (α, β, γ, δ, ε-latroinsectotoxins (LITs)), and one on crustaceans (α-latrocrustatoxin (α-LCT)). LaTXs bind to specific receptors on the surface of neuronal cells, inducing the release of neurotransmitters either by directly stimulating exocytosis or by forming Ca²⁺-conductive tetrameric pores in the membrane.
Despite extensive studies in the past decades, a high-resolution structure of a LaTX is not yet available and the precise mechanism of LaTX action remains unclear. Here, we report cryoEM structures of the α-LCT monomer and the δ-LIT dimer. The structures reveal that LaTXs are organized in four domains. A C-terminal domain of ankyrin-like repeats shields a central membrane insertion domain of six parallel α-helices. Both domains are flexibly linked via an N-terminal α-helical domain and a small β-sheet domain.
A comparison between the structures suggests that oligomerization involves major conformational changes in LaTXs with longer C-terminal domains. Based on our data we propose a cyclic mechanism of oligomerization, taking place prior to membrane insertion. Both recombinant α-LCT and δ-LIT form channels in artificial membrane bilayers, that are stabilized by Ca²⁺ ions and allow calcium flux at negative membrane potentials. Our comparative analysis between α-LCT and δ-LIT provides first crucial insights towards understanding the molecular mechanism of the LaTX family.
nomdeplume #8
maybe meal worms are incapable of eating spiders
@10 They could try….
… and you didn’t have the good manners to offer them a glass of Chianti.
@12:
Fortunately, fava beans weren’t on the menu, either.
Thing is, PZ is doing the equivalent of feeding little children to the spiders.
Well, the larval form, not the adult beetle form, but basically that.
(And given PZ breeds mealworms, he must have beetles to perpetuate the cycle)
Also, they do have a rather cool name: Tenebrio molitor — the Dark Grinder.
chigau
Maybe but they’re apparently capable of consuming and digesting plastic.