Uh-oh. I’m going to be glued to my chair all day #arachnids20

The American Arachnology Society Virtual Summer Symposium has been delivered in digestible lumps all through the weekend — two hours here, two hours there — but the marathon begins today, with 15 minute talks beginning at 9am and continuing throughout the day until 7pm. Now there’s the traditional conference structure! Maybe only 10-20% of the talks are relevant to my interests, but I’m just going to put them all up on my second monitor and keep the information trickling my way, perking up when the right magic words are uttered.

It’s not as if I’m going to be going out and about today anyway. A thunderstorm rolled right over my house early this morning, and more are forecast continuing through the early afternoon. Also, hot. Too hot.

Have I been training cannon fodder?

I teach a lot of students who plan on careers in medicine — doctors and nurses. I keep hearing, though, that medical staffing is hitting a ceiling. The people we rely on to treat COVID-19 are vulnerable.

The coronavirus pandemic has tightened its grip on much of Africa, where reported cases have more than tripled over the last month, jeopardizing overstretched medical teams as the need for care soars.

From the pandemic’s early days, leaders across the continent urged prevention and took aggressive action — sealing borders, tracing contacts and building extra isolation wards — asserting that many places lacked the resources to withstand unchecked outbreaks.

Now African health officials and medical professionals are raising concerns about cracks in a crucial armor: Infections among health-care workers have shot up 203 percent since late May, according to the World Health Organization’s Africa arm, following a spike in community transmission and a drop in access to protective gear.

Africa, you say? Who cares? (Well, I would hope my audience wouldn’t say that). But it also hits close to home, with hospitals in Alabama, for instance, reaching capacity. Of course, “capacity” in this case is partly a function of staffing, not just the number of beds. As the pandemic spreads further, that means that effective capacity is going to gradually decline. Everything is going to get worse.

My university is opening in August. We’ve got plans to minimize contact — I’m going to be teaching all of my classes, except the labs, over Zoom — but I’m expecting we’ll shut down the labs, too. We have to keep the flow out of our pre-professional programs going, don’t you know!

I get it now

So “second wave” is kind of like the second stage of a rocket, and is going to launch us to an even higher altitude?

I think maybe our current academic year plans in which I teach all of my classes online, except for labs which have been halved in size to allow adequate social distancing, might turn out to be optimistic.

Spider fans gather at #Arachnids20 today!

Hey! Tonight! It’s the start of the 2020 American Arachnology Society Virtual Summer Symposium, and it’s going to be great.

We’re very excited to launch the AAS 2020 Virtual Summer Symposium TODAY, June 25, 7-9 PM ET with a brief welcome and overview of the symposium, and the keynote address by Martin Ramirez, Senior Researcher at Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, Buenos Aires, Argentina. This talk is honoring the contributions of Norman Platnick to arachnology: “From roots to myriad leaves: the legacy of Norman Platnick on spider systematics”.

So it’s going to start with a discussion of this Platnick.

I anticipate some spicy conversations about cladistics.

Also note, tomorrow is all about social justice.

We also want to share updates and encourage you to join the Forum tomorrow, Friday June 26, 3-5 pm ET where we will host a community discussion of impacts of racism on arachnology and potential actions the AAS can take.

At a science conference?!?? Of course. Smart people care about correcting racial inequalities.

The data is suggestive

It’s been almost a month since George Floyd was murdered, and protests erupted across the country (and the world) very shortly after, so there’s been time enough for the coronavirus to piggy-back on the crowds and cause a surge in infection rates. But look at these plots, especially for Hennepin county!

That’s good news, but it’s a little confusing. Why aren’t those big crowds perfect petri dishes for the pandemic?

What’s more, a new analysis based on cell-phone tracking data suggests a surprising reason for the lack of protest-related spikes in COVID-19: In the cities with large protests, the wider population actually spent more time at home during the demonstrations — suggesting that any surge caused by virus transmission at the protests themselves would have been countered by an increase in social distancing among the rest of the cities’ populations.

While experts consulted by BuzzFeed News agreed that wearing masks and being outside may have reduced the risk of viral transmission at the protests, they pointed to other possible factors as well. Many of the protesters were young, for example, meaning that new infections that occurred while they were demonstrating would be less likely to cause severe disease and show up in official case counts. And even though hundreds of thousands participated in the protests, that’s still a relatively small number compared to the total population of the cities involved — so it might be hard to notice transmission of the coronavirus at the protests.

“The fact is that we will just never know for sure, because there’s too many moving parts,” Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Irvine, told BuzzFeed News.

Epidemiology is hard — too many variables, too many moving parts. This suggests, however, that you shouldn’t expect dramatic surges from the recent Republican rally, for the same reasons: small crowds relative to the greater population. That participants were generally older might have more effect, though, and BLM protest participants seem to be a lot more careful about using masks and distancing..

What’s worrying is that the article also shows recent rapid rises in states like Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and South Carolina, and the country overall. That’s associated with states that have been generally opening up, and reducing mask and social distancing expectations. The lesson: general policy is far more influential than limited events. Republican governors are greater threats to public health than grassroots protests.

AAS Meeting starts Thursday!

Maybe I’m the only one enthused by it all, but the 2020 American Arachnology Society Virtual Summer Symposium starts the day after tomorrow. Online admission is only $10 if you want to see it! A quick summary of the schedule:

  • Thursday evening is a keynote recognizing the contributions of Norm Platnick.
  • Friday is a Discussion: Impacts of Racism on Recruitment and Retention of Black Arachnologists. Every scientific society is finally trying to pay attention to this issue.
  • Saturday, we have a workshop on using iNaturalist for science and outreach.
  • Sunday is the online poster session.
  • Monday looks like wall-to-wall 15 minute presentations.

A jolly time will be held by all. It’s more spread out than the usual in-person scientific meeting, which means, I hope, it will be low-stress and a little less exhausting than the usual affair.

Scouting out potential field sites

This is just a brief update on my summer research. I’ve mentioned before that I’m more of a bench scientist kind of guy, but that’s changing to some degree. Part of it is this COVID-19 pandemic, which is limiting lab access and forcing me to spend more time in alternate activities. A larger part is that last year I switched from zebrafish work, which was entirely an indoor activity with an inbred species, to looking at spiders, which are immensely diverse and more complicated – they don’t all live in nice air-conditioned buildings.

So last year I’d also begun a project where I surveyed spider populations in people’s garages and sheds – it was convenient for a newbie arachnologist, because it narrowed the environments and limited the number of different species I had to identify. But that project is also on hold this year, because knocking on people’s doors and asking them to let you survey their living spaces is a bad idea during a pandemic. Instead, I saw this as an opportunity to spread my wings and get familiar with more spiders and more environments, and an excuse to move out of garages and out into the wide world.

Yeah, I moved all the way from a lab to a garage…baby steps, you know. This summer I decided to go off and challenge myself with more complex spaces. This involves going to places that aren’t full of houses, that aren’t occupied by lots of people, and that may involve walking off into the brush and finding inconvenient spots with relatively undisturbed habitat.

One of the tools I’ve started using is a drone to scout out locations. I’m lazy; if I see some tantalizing bit of habitat well off the road in the distance, it’s nice to be able to send a drone out to see how navigable the path looks and whether it looks as interesting closeup as it does from a kilometer away, without having to actually walk there.

I’m using a Mavic Mini, which is wonderfully easy and convenient. It’s tiny, so I can actually stuff it in my camera bag and carry it with me, and it’s easy to fly so the basic things I want to do with it aren’t an obstacle. It’s fun to fly, but I didn’t want to get sucked into a vortex of struggling to learn how to use it. Lazy, remember? If this gadget were complex, at some point I’d decide it was easier to just leg it through the brush.

Not a problem. This thing is so easy that any idiot can use it to make a quick scan of a kilometer of ground.

What am I looking for? What am I not looking for is an easier question. I’m avoiding agricultural areas, which scratches off 90+% of the terrain around here, and I’m shunning, mostly, parks that have been groomed and are full of people, and although we have a lot of lakes, the larger ones tend to be surrounded with lake cabins and are privately owned. I want something abandoned or as near to wild Minnesota as I can get, but I also want it accessible (but not too accessible). I’ve been going over maps, and found a few promising places.

There are several state wildlife management areas near me. These are patches of land set aside for non-agricultural use – the intent is that they are a kind of reserve where local wildlife can thrive undisturbed. The primary motivation seems to be to shelter ducks and deer for a while, so they can be shot later, but at least no one is intentionally culling the local spiders. So yesterday we took a spin and visited a few of them.

The first spot we visited was perfect. This was the Dolven State Wildlife Management Area, and it spoiled me. I didn’t need the drone at all; there was a nicely groomed parking area with a bench, and right across the road was a beautiful messy environment, perfect for spiders. I buzzed the place anyway. This location was in a loop of the Pomme de Terre river, there was a bit of wetland enclosed in the river and another stretch of woods right next door. No hiking required!

A river, grassy patches, and a cluttered wood right there, so I could just plunk myself down in one spot and have a grand time puzzling out the spider population. It’s also only 6 minutes from my house. Very convenient!

The second spot…less convenient. Only a little further, a whole 9 minutes away, but the Klason State Wildlife Management Area was less diverse and less accessible. There’s a deeply rutted unmaintained road that parallels it, complete with spots that were mud wallows and that we weren’t going to even try to cross in our little Honda Fit.

A quick survey with the drone revealed that there was little point in exploring deeper, since it was the same flat scrubby grassland all along its length, and we could just pick any point we could reach and sample it there.

The third place we checked out was lovely. It’s the office of our local Wetland Management District, which has a driving path and footpaths. While it has groomed paths and gets a little tourist traffic (this is Morris, so not a lot of that), it is a wildlife refuge with prairie grasslands, marshes, ponds, and wooded areas, and it sprawls out over a lot of area. The drone was useful here for checking out some sites that were off the trails, and that have some real potential for being places where spiders lurk, although, truth be told, spiders lurk everywhere.

What’s next? There are a few more places I want to survey, mainly some local spots that are neglected and full of regrowth, and I’d also like to toss an abandoned farm with decaying buildings into the mix – spiders love a good ol’ abandoned barn. Then it’s time for the hard work, plunking myself down for a few hours in the early morning or late evening, using a sweep net, gathering spider samples and then sitting down and staring at taxonomic keys trying to figure out who they are.

Also, I’ve got a few vats of permethrin and picaridin on order. Part of the joy of getting out of the lab and into the field is discovering how much ticks love us. We were plucking them off us all evening yesterday, and even now I’ve got the creepy crawlies as I imagine more of the ugly cousins of the arachnids I like crawling over me.