Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!
I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.
I got word from a colleague* that their compost bin was accumulating spiders again — they had a swarm of them last spring, that disappeared over winter — so I had to check it out. I opened the bin and was disappointed at first, because while I saw lots of cobwebs all over the decaying vegetable matter, there was nowhere near the number of spiders I’d seen in the spring.
I finally spotted one in a corner. Steatoda borealis, the same species that had thoroughly colonized the bin before.
Steatoda borealis is an interesting theridiidid. They seem to be the native species to this area, with the more common house spiders being immigrants from either Eurasia or South America, depending on the species. These beasts are bigger than the others, and I haven’t seen them in houses or garages much, mainly outdoors or in special environments like this compost bin. I’ve got some in the lab, and they seem less active than Parasteatoda or Steatoda triangulosa, but that may be because I’ve only observed them in the day.
I spent several moments poking around in the bin, taking a bunch of photos, making a note to myself to come back in a week or two. Then I started to lower the lid. The lid I’d been holding up all this time with my left hand. Only then did I notice that it was covered in webbing, and there were all the spiders, lots of them, gettin’ busy busy beneath my oblivious fingertips. Squeee! Jackpot!
So I had to take a bunch more photos. These spiders were paired off all over the place, mating furiously! I took photos of these wonderful piles of tangled legs, 16 at a time with agitated bodies having a grand time.
You’ve probably heard about female spiders killing their mates and eating them, but that doesn’t happen so much in environments rich in food. Steatoda and Parasteatoda can happily coexist in sprawling web communities where lots of insect life is rising up from a festering mass, and they don’t do the cannibalism thing in those circumstances.
I did notice one lonely male off to the side of a mating pair, staring intensely. I hope you find your true love soon, little guy!
Definitely going back here later. It’s a wild little hotspot for spider orgies.
This post also appears on my Patreon account, complete with spider photos. The photos are also posted on Instagram and iNaturalist.
*A colleague in math. Curious fact: two of the professors in our math discipline have the most interesting spider populations in their yards. Is it something about mathematicians that attracts spiders?
In my state of limited mobility, the best I can do is roam around my yard looking for spiders. I’m not seeing any, other than a few Parasteatoda in the garage and compost, despite the fact that we’ve got lots of flowers, and it’s mid-July, and you’d think they ought to be thriving. We don’t even have any grass spiders!
What we do have is clouds of flies. Just hovering swarms of little bitty flies hovering around everything.
Come to my yard, spiders! There is a feast awaiting you!
I get excited when I find a couple of delicate strands of silk*, but then Mary has to come along and gloat about all the birds she saw just yesterday:
American Crow, American Goldfinch, American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee, Blue Jay, Brown-headed Cowbird, Canada Goose, Cedar Waxwing, Chipping Sparrow, Collared Dove, Common Grackle, Common Pheasant, Common Starling, Downy Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Great-tailed Grackle, Hairy Woodpecker, Hermit Thrush, House Finch, House Sparrow, Mallard, Mourning Dove, Northern Cardinal, Northern Flicker, Northern House Wren, Purple Finch, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Red-tailed Hawk, Red-winged Blackbird, Rock Dove, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Song Sparrow, White-breasted Nuthatch, White-throated Sparrow, Wood Duck, Yellow-rumped Warbler.
It’s no fair! She has set up this grand array of birdfeeders to draw in the local species.
There is ONE bird in all of that alluring food this morning.
Also unfair: stupid vertebrates. It takes a little longer for invertebrates to warm up. Give ’em time, they’ll outnumber the birds soon enough…probably already. They’re just not a bunch of show-offs.
Happy Earth Day!
* I’m also seeing silk in the compost bin, but the compost hasn’t thawed out yet. Soon!
When I want to hide from the news, I’ve always got bugs to tend. I’ve been neglecting my mealworm colony, so this morning I cleaned it out — it was mostly full of frass, which explains why my harvest was a bit low. Here’s today’s collection.
The frass is in the compost, I scooped up a handful of the larvae to feed the spiders today, and the rest got dumped into a couple pounds of fresh cornmeal with an overripe banana as a treat.
I’ve got to expand this colony, just in case the situation in America becomes even more dire, and I need a source of healthy protein for myself, not just the spiders.
That’s my town!
Unfortunately, they cropped out the university, which would be to the left of the top of the photo. I say unfortunately, because it comes from an article that’s all about how the University of Minnesota Morris’s Green Initiative has benefited the entire region.
The farm town of the future is visible long before you reach the city limits, thanks to a pair of wind turbines rising as high as the Statue of Liberty above the flat terrain. They pump cheap electricity into the local grid, providing the energy to make carbon-neutral fertilizer. Closer in, cows graze next to solar panels that provide them with shade. A county-wide compost operation disposes of food and agricultural waste, electric buses take kids to school, the public library relies on geothermal heating and even a city-owned liquor store has rooftop solar panels. (The shop motto: “We chill your beer with the sun.”)
Where is this environmental Nirvana that’s checking off so many boxes on the climate warrior’s wish list? Denmark? Germany? Northern California? No, it’s Morris, Minn., population 5,206, a conservative prairie community in a conservative rural county that favored Donald Trump by 22 points in the 2020 presidential election.
It’s fair to say that environmental and climate concerns have never been front of mind when it comes to votes and policies in Morris. But residents will talk all day long about rural self-sufficiency, high energy and fuel costs, saving tax dollars and eliminating costly inefficiency and waste. When Troy Goodnough, the director of sustainability at the local campus of the University of Minnesota, arrived more than 15 years ago and asked how he could help address those economic concerns, a partnership emerged that has made Morris one of the most sustainable farm towns in America—even though that was never the town’s goal.
They know that Trump hates wind turbines, but it’s all about the money.
Goodnough’s bet was that the common-sense, cost-saving goals the farmers prized could lead them to choices that also happened to be good for the environment. But could it really be as simple as changing the terms of that conversation? Yes, says Blaine Hill, the recently retired city manager who helped make it happen. “We never made it about climate. We just did it because it makes sense. And the more we did, the more we wanted to do.”
The result has been dubbed “the Morris Model” by its participants: the town, the school district, Stevens County and the campus of 1,500 students. They are making their data and blueprints available to other communities interested in trying something similar. Thirteen other towns in Minnesota are at various stages of adapting Morris Model projects. The one furthest along is spearheaded by the city of Fergus Falls, with the help of a regional planning nonprofit. They are organizing 10 other rural towns into a “solar cohort” to increase purchasing power and simplify the complex grant process to get state and federal aid for these efforts.
…
Goodnough sensed an opening. The Morris city government had a tight budget, and its high electric bills were a sore spot. The university, meanwhile, had just realized substantial savings by converting old lighting on campus to modern LEDs. Goodnough offered to help the city do the same, including help with tapping into Department of Energy funds to offset the upfront costs. The conversion ended up saving the city $80,000 a year—a significant windfall for a small town. Soon, the Morris town elders came to the university to ask, “What’s next?”
The larger community might be conservative, but it’s the liberals and progressives of the university that got it all started. You’re welcome, Republicans.
I disturbed the mass of spiders living in my compost bin, and apparently I disrupted the status quo, because one large female rushed over and attacked a smaller female. I guess she was taking advantage of my intrusion to take out the competition.
Spider battles are tangly and confusing.
I was checking out our compost bin, which is swarming with young juvenile spiders, and what jumped out at me was how fat they’re getting. These little spiders are growing fast and are turning into regular whales. This one, I noticed, had a secret stash — they’d corralled a bunch of baby isopods to snack on whenever they felt peckish.
Parasteatoda
Yum. All gathered into one spot, and tender and delicious nibbles, too. No wonder they’re getting so plump.
Personally, I’m feeling well satiated right now. I scheduled one class to turn in their final assignment last night, and another class to turn in their term papers tonight. I’d rather lick isopods off a compost bin lid than read any more student papers.
A swarm of Parasteatoda have hatched out in my compost bin, and I’ve tried a few times to get decent photos of them, but it’s hard. They’re young and tiny — less than half a millimeter long — and they’re busy, scampering all over to build webs, so shooting them is tough. Also, I’m rusty from a long winter neglecting my camera.
Here’s one being spooky, its cephalothorax in shadow with just the pair of posterior median eyes visible and glowing.
I’ll keep practicing and they’ll keep growing.
It’s been raining off and on for the past week, and we have rain forecast for the next ten days, right up through commencement, and the trees have started vomiting up leaves.
You’ll notice even our bedraggled lawn is turning green.
Spring won’t actually be here until the grass spiders start putting up tents all over the yard. I’ve been watching a couple of places where I know Theridion always lurks, and have been seeing traces of silk; we also found a Parasteatoda building a cobweb in our compost bin. Once classes are over, it’ll be time to get down in the weeds and see who else is emerging.
