The prodigal spider returns, and my cabinet of optical curiosities

I reported yesterday that the tiniest of my juvenile spiders had vanished, and I feared that she had escaped. I was wrong! She was still there, tucked away under a crossbar of the frame, being shy and quiet. Either that, or she had just taken off for a day to fight crime. She was famished and immediately chowed down on a fly this morning, so that is a possibility.

I also mentioned that in my ongoing lab clean-up efforts, I had unearthed another assortment of microscopical oddments that I tucked away in my cabinet dedicated to antique optics, and threatened to show you some of it. I now make good on that threat.

My predecessors at this university in cell biology, Drs. Abbott and Gooch, collected a few gadgets and were clearly imaging people. Some of it was just lying around in boxes, and when I find it, I fish it out and toss it onto a shelf. It’s really just junk at this point, and I have no use for any of it, but once upon a time these things cost a lot of money and I have a fondness for old technology, so as long as I’ve got the space, I’ll hang onto it.

Here’s the whole cabinet. It’s just a hodge-podge, not organized at all.

Look at this — a real treasure. That’s a Konica (now Konica-Minolta) Hexanon camera lens! Those, once upon a time, were high-end optics — now though, they don’t fit any camera I’ve got, and you can’t even get adapters to make them work with DSLRs, since the focal length is too short. I’ve thought a few times about collecting old lenses to play with photographically, when I get rich, but this one…nah, sadly, not something I could use, unless I were to also collect old camera bodies. Nope.

There are also a few cheap video lenses in view, and I’ve got a few CCTV cameras that seem to work, if ever I wanted to image stuff with RS-170 again. Ooh, 525 lines of fuzzy resolution. Also lenses from Cosmicar (a division of Pentax) and Computar (which is still around, making lenses), and several C-mount adapters for various microscopes.

I have a couple of Zeiss lamp housings and this tube for a fluorescence microscope. Someone was doing some nifty stuff in the 1970s, I suspect. There are also a couple of massive illuminator bases with interesting clamps — part of an optical bench setup?

These were some other curiosities very neatly packaged in solid boxes with faded velvet padding: something called an optibeam, a name I associate with antennas, but this has a couple of lenses, so I have no idea what it’s for. There’s also a massive syringe of metal and glass, very impressive, I might have to use it to terrify the grandchildren.

Not shown: I also have some mystery boxes of my own, with DECtape reels and Zip drives, which were all the rage in the 1990s. They seem quaint now — 100mb on a clunky plastic drive when I’m carrying around a terabyte in my pocket, on little thumbnail sized chips? Nah, they’re about as obsolete as all the junk on my shelf.

If you see something in those photos that get you excited, though, I can probably make arrangements with the university bureaucracy to ship them out. Otherwise, I predict that my successor someday will just sweep them all into a box and send them off to a landfill.

Spider Zen: a loss, and a discovery!

I had another morning therapy session in the lab. First, the bad news: I think there was an escapee. Sound the alarms! Head for the hills! Panic! Run in circles, scream and shout!

Actually, the problem is that I’ve moved some of the juveniles to my larger cages, and the one that seems to have gotten away was tiny, and I think she may have found a crack in the lid and scurried off to even wider vistas. In the future, I’m going to have to grow the babies to a larger size before moving to the bigger cages. Oh well. I hope she prospers out there!

The fun news, though, is that while I was tidying up I found a Mystery Box in one forgotten corner. It was full of antique microscopy gear! I think much of it might have come from my predecessors, Dr Gooch, who retired just a few years ago, or Dr Abbott, who retired a few years before I was hired here. This box contained an oddball assortment of video adapters — nothing that fits my current microscopes, and they’re all fitted with the old C-mount style threaded fittings for, like, CCTV cameras. I’ve been collecting these odds and ends for years, and I’ll add them to my mini-museum shelf. I’ll sort them out tomorrow, and maybe post a few photos here — I should probably catalog them at some point, because while they aren’t actually useful to me, except as curiosities, maybe someone out there could find a purpose for some fragment of a Zeiss scope from the 1980s.

Spider therapy works!

Again, I spent another hour in the lab this morning, doing nothing but feeding spiders and cleaning up. I’ve been throwing flies at them every morning, and they’re still ravenous. I may have been under-feeding them. They’re growing young juveniles, and we all know how much teenagers can eat. The ones I’ve moved out of their little 130ml containers into spacious 5.7l living quarters are also doing fine, although they’ve just picked out one corner to fill with cobweb so far. Curiously, they’ve all picked the same corner of their respective cages, the one closest to the timed light.

I also did some cleaning therapy, scrubbing down a couple of benchtops. The place may be cleaner than it’s been in 20 years now! I bundled up some of the old fish gear; some got thrown away, another big coil of irrigation tubing was brought home. Maybe Mary will think of some use for it in the garden. There’s plenty left, but I hate to part with the PVC pipe and fittings.

I should have started doing this long ago. Committing myself to at least an hour of semi-mindless maintenance, even when I’ve got to set aside class prep and grading for a bit, gets my day off to a good start and soothes my stressed-out brain.

Everyone should do it. Tend to your spiders, whatever they may be!

Eking out a little spider time

This has been a stressful year, and I haven’t been giving the spiders the time they deserve. So I’ve recently resolved to spend an hour a day in the lab, even if all my other work is screaming at me, just tending to the basics. It’s soothing, I think, and it’ll make the spiders happy, which is what counts.

I have to go in to the university every morning anyway, to open up the fly lab and check on the status of student experiments, and now instead of rushing back to prepare for a lecture or do some grading, I have a zen-like period of contemplation in which I, for instance, feed the spiders, or wash dirty spider cages, or throw out old accumulated debris. I still have some plumbing and aquarium supplies that I’m moving out to our departmental dumpster a bit at a time. Anyone want a bucket of sand? An aquarium pump and filter? I’m putting those all behind me.

This morning I fed the babies; I’m trying out a daily feeding regimen, rather than twice a week, to see if can get them to grow a little faster. I’ve also moved some of the up-and-coming generation from the 130ml plastic cubes to 5.7l adult cages, to see if the expanded space promotes expanded growth. They look so tiny and lost in there! But they are cobwebbing them up well enough. I just hope that the flies aren’t getting lost in all that volume.

I’m also working at spiffing up the lab a bit, picking a stretch of bench every morning, cleaning it up and scrubbing it down, and just generally making it all shiny and tidy. I’ve been neglecting my patrons at my patreon account, and on my list of things to do is, in addition to more spiders as they emerge this spring, a video tour of my spider lab, maybe in the next two weeks (next weekend is hellish with grading, but maybe the weekend after that). This will initially be a patron-only video, but maybe I’ll make it public the month after. Sign up if you want to see the premiere! All the money donated every month goes to pay off our legal debt! I look forward to clearing that debt in the next few years so I can sink the money into the lab instead.

Well, that was challenging

Today I tried to lead my students through some simple genetics problems over Zoom. In class, it would be easy: put up the problem, have the students pull out a piece of paper and try to solve it, while I wander the classroom seeing what they were doing, offering hints and suggestions as I go, and at the end I’d have an idea of where the individuals were struggling.

On Zoom, nope.

I’d present the problem, and then…no, I have no way to observe the process. I told them they could let me know their answer over the private chat, and if it looked good, I’d call on them and they could explain how they solved it.

First difficulty: these are smart students, and they quickly figured out the flaw in my plan. If they gave the answer, I’d call on them; simple solution: sit on the answer for as long as possible. The first problem I put up produced a deadly silence, with all those black rectangles not showing anything, and my chat window being totally blank. I’d try to nudge them along, but not knowing where they were in the problem meant I had no idea where they were stuck. Or if they even were stuck.

They started to warm up as the hour went on — probably as they realized these weren’t really that hard, and they were seeing how to reach the solution — but it was still agonizing. It took us the whole hour to do 3 problems. And I’ve promised/threatened to do it again on Thursday. As it stands, they’re getting an exam next week and I’ve had little opportunity to interact with them to work through even simple problems.

Stupid virus. Let me get back into a real classroom again.

Birds vs. Spiders

It’s been snowing all day. The birds have been frolicking in my backyard. So I aimed a camera at them and recorded a timelapse video.

I have a sneaky purpose, though. Do bird videos draw in more viewers than spider videos? I’ll let you know in a few days.

Or a few hours. Within 3 hours, a video with just birds in it passes the traffic count accumulated by a spider video over 3 days.

I could just cry.

Dread teaching

I’m caught up on a lot of grading, but today I now have to explain while they got so much wrong. The mean on the last exam was 75, which isn’t bad, but a lot of students are certain they deserve an A on everything, so I have to tell them today that the grade they got was the grade they deserve, and then explain how to solve the problems correctly. Many of the errors were due to invalid assumptions. For example, some people were confused by the term “wild type” — they had it in their heads, largely from their introductory population genetics course, that wild type was simply the most common phenotype in the cross, so for instance, whatever the phenotype of the heterozygotes was in a simple hybrid cross, that was “wild type”. Yikes. So now I also have to reset my brain and stop assuming they know all the basic conventions.

Next bit of fun: we’re wrapping up a standard complementation assay in the lab, so I have to talk to them about writing up a lab report, which means that, while I’ve finished a painful backlog of grading, I’m about to tell them to create a lot more work for me.

Somehow, in all that, I also have to teach them about deletions, duplications, and translocations this week, and then next week we plunge into the happy world of recombination and gene mapping, and more math. Sometimes I wonder how I can keep going, since I’m pretty sure that by the end of the semester all of my students hate me.

The spider routine

In case you were curious, here’s the boring routine for maintaining a colony of cute little Parasteatoda juveniles. Teenagers! Always demanding your time.

Right now I’ve got a sink full of dirty spider containers. I’ll have to get those cleaned up this week.