MORE! MORE SPIDERS! YOU ARE ALL DOOOOMED!

I went off to feed the spiders this morning, and as I was going out the door, Mary asked if I needed any more egg sacs. “I hope not,” I replied, because I’ve got so many baby spiders to tend that I’m not sure what I would do if I had another round of hatchlings. So she cursed me. I found 7 nice new Parasteatoda egg sacs, and 2 new Steatoda triangulosa sacs. I tell you, I’m getting so good at breeding spiders I am currently oscillating between two states.

The only thing that will save me is that I expect, from past experience, that about half the egg sacs will contain only infertile eggs. It’s not my fault, the females are picky, and some of them constantly friendzone* all their suitors. Three of them are definitely from non-virginal, proven breeders, though, so I’m anticipating dealing with about 300 more babies soon.

By the way, I like to regularly remind you all that I have a Patreon, and if you want to see a photo of a hungry baby at the table, sign up!

*“friendzone”, in the native Spider, is synonymous with “murder and eat”. I suspect MRAs/Incels of being native Spider speakers, which has led to all kinds of confusion and erroneous ideas about the human version of the word.

I know I rag on physicists sometimes, but you’ve got to stop making it so easy

God damn it.

This is true, mostly. It’s the University of Illinois, and it was a physicist and a bioengineering professor (who had also done some ecological modeling) who came up with the model.

Physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and bioengineering Professor Sergei Maslov, who developed models of the disease for the state and campus, said they think cases can be kept to a level that can be traced and won’t overwhelm the hospital system.

They also used a grossly simplified model of human interactions, which they claim was a “worst-case scenario”. It wasn’t.

“We did not model the friendship social networks of the students when they go outside and socialize in bars and restaurants,” he said. “So our calculation is, in fact, a worst-case scenario, because we assume more mixing outside of the university.”

Here’s an absolutely classic physicist comment from back in March.

For them, transitioning to epidemiology was easy. “The equations that describe epidemics are simplified versions of ones that describe ecology,” says Goldenfeld. For the COVID-19 model, they chose equations that echoed models of predator and prey.

So…epidemiology is easy, they just had to strip out a lot of complicating factors, and then adapt a general ecology model that isn’t actually appropriate here. In other words, they imagined a spherical frictionless undergraduate, made a model that they liked, and then — JESUS FUCKING CHRIST — got the ear of the governor of Illinois and set the policy for whole state.

And now…

Parties, gatherings and “irresponsible and dangerous” behavior has led to a spike of nearly 800 coronavirus cases on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus, school officials said, and the university is cracking down.

On Wednesday, the university announced 780 new coronavirus cases on the campus, the Chicago Tribune reported. The campus is now implementing mandatory testing twice a week for all students.

You know, you could have listened to epidemiologists, who actually have some specific expertise in this sort of thing.

I will judge a book by its cover

And this cover reaches out with a supple and sexy tentacle to wrap around my neck and draw me in closer, where it whispers “buy me.” It helps that the author is very, very good, so I can trust the content will be excellent, but oh what a hook.

Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis will be available on 22 September. You can get in line now.

Finally! A book that will truly understand the male condition.

Oy, so much work

Just so you know, this is a terrible week (has there ever been a good one?). I’m doing this big deal faculty seminar at my university tomorrow, which has my anxiety jacked to 100, and I’m giving an exam on Friday, increasing student anxiety, and I have students who have been exposed to COVID and are quarantined, and I haven’t been able to go out spidering as much as I would enjoy. It also didn’t help to have FtB suddenly crash out. Things are happening, though. We’re making real progress on getting the apparatus for some behavioral studies running, and even have a backlog of data piling up from nightly time-lapse runs. Here’s another one.

We’re slowly clearing away bottlenecks. We’re still uploading data as we collect it on our Raspberry Pi to a Google Drive (that was about 2 gigabytes of frames for that video), and then downloading it to our personal computers. One catch is that Mac makes me unhappy again, choking on the download. Linux makes me happy because it has absolutely no problem smoothly downloading data from Google, but then it makes me unhappy because it doesn’t have the sweet easy video tools I want. But then Mac makes me happy because it does, so I just use a flash drive to move the data to my Mac, which can instantly convert everything. So the data is flowing from Raspberry Pi → Google Drive → Linux → Mac, and then to YouTube. It’s nice to see everyone getting along, but if we had a way to bypass one step of that pathway, I’d probably take it. Especially since at some point I might want to have a couple of Raspberry Pis chugging away at observations.

Night moves

Our spiders are very quiet during the day, but we noticed that every morning their cages were full of fresh cobwebs. We knew they were sneaking around at night, and we resolved to catch them at it. A student, Ade Atolani, and I put together a gadget so we could watch.

We got a Raspberry Pi with a NoIR camera, drilled a hole in a plastic cage, and mounted it above a spider. I had no idea if this would work adequately at all — would we have enough resolution to even see the spider? How effective was this camera at seeing in the dark anyway? — so we just slapped together a quick trial run. We turned everything on late one afternoon, told the Raspberry Pi to take a picture every 60 seconds, and let’s see what we get. Miraculously, it all worked, first try.

What you’ll see in the video is a rectangular wooden frame in a cage, and we’re looking down on it. There’s a nice velvety dark cloth on the bottom, to minimize glare and reflections. At the beginning, there’s diffuse light from the window, so the infrared camera isn’t kicking in yet, but when it gets dark enough, the IR lamps automatically switch on, and the purplish black cloth looks pink. The important thing is that we can see the spider all night long, as it goes through bursts of activity. Awesome.

It looks like we’re going to have to sample at a higher rate, because the behavior is very bursty. We’ll enclose the whole set up in a light-proof box to get rid of the extraneous light. I also want to try some side illumination with an IR lamp to see if we can resolve the webbing as it goes up. This was just a pilot experiment, but it’s very promising.

Good morning, babies!

It’s time to get an apartment of your own!

On the left in this vial you can see the egg sac; on the right the black shriveled thing is a mealworm that was consumed by Mom. Mom has been moved out already. All those little black dots everywhere? Baby spiders. I’m going to have to go remove that foam plug now, and quickly sort ’em all out.

Quick! Do some community science before winter strikes!

There are two fun projects you can do right now.

  • #Invertefest begins today! All you need to do is wander around your home or parks or wherever and take photographs of any invertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish do not count) and post them. Any invertebrates! It doesn’t have to be spiders! You’ve got bumblebees in your yard, cockroaches in your kitchen, lice in your hair, those are all good.
  • Eight-Eyed Expedition is a new one. They want you to get out and observe California tetragnathids, a kind of orb-weaving spider. They’re easy to recognize with their long skinny bodies. You can also photograph them and post them, but there’s an additional request: they want you to write to them and request a collecting kit. They’ll send you vials of alcohol and more instructions, and in this case what they want you to do is find them, photograph them, record their exact location, and then kill them humanely and send their little preserved bodies back to Berkely. This does seem to be a California-exclusive project, which breaks my heart because one of the things they’ll give you is a “Certified Arachnologist” sticker, and I ache for the validation.

At least I’m going to get out and take photos of Minnesota invertebrates today, even though my wife snuck around and erected another bird feeder right outside my office window.

This vertebrate does not count.