My desk spider, the Parasteatoda I keep in front of me on my desk, made an egg sac!
How is your desk spider doing?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
My desk spider, the Parasteatoda I keep in front of me on my desk, made an egg sac!
How is your desk spider doing?
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None visible at present. But there was one rolling his eyes at me a few years ago.
The light caught them just right and it was a pretty light show.
The Pholcid that lives down the end of my sofa has gone missing of late. There have been quite a few spiderlings requiring rescue from the bath, so something hatched somewhere. In other spider-ish news – https://refractor.io/biology/daddy-longlegs-catch-and-eat-frogs/
I don’t know a lot about spider reproduction, but are you sure you don’t have two spiders?🕷️🕷️
Spiders store sperm. She could have mated once a month ago, and could make babies in perpetuity after that.
She’s the size of my left big toe. Don’t ask me how I can be certain of that.
Mine migrated to the bathroom.
I don’t have a desk spider, but Fred, the spider in my bathroom, and other Fred, the spider behind my refrigerator are both doing well.
microraptor, um, if they’re doing well, they must therefore have a food source.
(And they don’t do the ultraprocessed thing)
There is an odd mesh-thing under my Ikea desk that I thought would spontaneously generation me some spiders. Alas, the cat patrol has kept it free of arachnidae.
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/09/fastest-spider-on-the-planet-brown-huntsman
Pullquote:
Clemente’s research was originally published in 2021 and aimed to understand the unique way that spiders get about.
But rather than go searching for what he thought would be the quickest spiders, Clemente said he just grabbed the ones that were the easiest to get.
“These were just spiders I found in the back yard,” Clemente said. “I could just go out with my head torch and see them on the grass.
“I am interested in how different animals of different sizes move and whether muscle might limit the speed at which animals can run,” he said.
“Spiders don’t move using just muscle – they use a combination of muscles to retract their limbs and hydraulic pressure to push them outwards.
“That’s a completely different way of powering locomotion to other animals.”