Exciting! News! From the Spider Lab!

Well, I found it exciting anyway. One of the problems I’ve faced in my new research on local spiders is that I can’t tell two species apart, Parasteatoda tepidariorum and Parasteatoda tabulata. Even the expert sources I consult usually discriminate by dissecting their genitals, which is not useful for me, since I want to study live animals and embryos. There is one suggestive hint, though: P. tabulata builds funky little nests in their webs in the wild, while P. tepidariorum apparently does not. It’s a behavioral distinction, and I have no idea how definitive it is, but at least it’s an angle.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to see nest building in the lab. I’ve tried throwing in miscellaneous office debris, like stuff from a whole punch and a paper shredder, but they never pay attention to it. Maybe all of my lab animals are P. tep? Maybe I’m providing the wrong kinds of nest material? I dunno.

So yesterday, in a forlorn, half-assed try, I noticed all the fine wood shavings in the containers for wax worms, their food, and I sprinkled a few small shavings in the cage for one of the new generation of spiders, not yet named, and went home. I’d spread them around, and even avoided the place where she was currently nesting (spiders have preferred spots to hang out in).

Today, presto…she had gathered the majority of shavings into one central place, and had built a nest. Isn’t it beautiful?

You can’t see her in there, because she’s hiding. You can see her brown egg sac, near the top center of the nest. I’ve also highlighted the cobweb by misting it with water. I guess I was just failing to give them the correct home-building materials before.

This is excellent news! Now I have to give all of the spiders in my colony some wood shavings, and see if they fall into two groups, nest-builders and non-nest-builders. I have a student who proposed studying this distinction this summer, if that still happens in this age of pandemic, and one thing we’ll have to try is a nest construction time-lapse — that really was assembled overnight, so it’s speedy, but it was done in the dark, so we’ll have to play with cameras and lighting to see if we can observe it.

The bad news is that when Tabitha — she has a name now — dies, we’re going to have to dissect her and observe her genitals very closely, to independently confirm her species.

Otherwise, though, this is so exciting! Thrilling, even! All the spiders get wood shavings! Everyone gets wood shavings! You can have wood shavings! Come on, you’ve got to admit that complex nest construction behavior in an invertebrate is fun stuff, even if it’s totally unsurprising, given that spiders have always been elaborate builders.

P.S. You might actually be able to see a bit of spider anatomy poking out in one place, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to Find the Spider.

Aaron Ginn, smug know-nothing

Last week there was an article published by a guy named Aaron Ginn in Medium, which purported that the current pandemic was going to fade out relatively quickly and do far less harm than others expected. The article was spread widely — you might even say it went viral — and some big names in media promoted it. It was recently taken down, though, and I can’t link to it, nor would I, even if I could. It was a terrible article.

It was interesting as an exercise in critical thinking, though. The first week of my introductory biology course I share a bad science article with the students, and ask them to figure out how they would know whether to trust it or not. They quickly do the usual stuff — look at the source, look at the author, look at the quality of the data — which should have been the response to this article by Ginn…but no. It says things people wanted to hear, so it was disseminated uncritically.

What should have been noticed right away is that Ginn has zero qualifications in epidemiology, yet here he is claiming that the scientists were all wrong. You might be wondering what his qualifications are. He’s a silicon valley tech bro who claims to be an expert in “growth”, meaning how to increase the popularity of products online. Because he uses the word “virality” in his advertising and promotion work, surely he must be a master of the biology of real viruses. He even claims you don’t need a special degree to do epidemiology.

Jesus. Red flags and signal flares popping off all over that mess. The arrogance of these silicon valley dudes knows no limits, and we ought to be able to stop there. Except that Mr Ginn was quite annoyed when his silly, ignorant article was yanked, and he ran yipping and whining to other unqualified media personalities, like Brit Hume, Greg Guttfeld, and Steven Crowder (seriously, dude?), none of them with any qualifications in the subject, either. He’s being censored, don’t you know. He’s now frantically and rather indignantly defending his claims on Twitter. Someone ought to tell him that Brit Hume, let alone Crowder, isn’t exactly a smart guy to cite, and rather obviously his choice of who to beg for props is telling. Ginn writes for Breitbart in his spare time, and works with the California Republican party.

Anyway, ignore Ginn and his bad paper. Go read this Twitter thread by Carl Bergstrom, who actually knows what he’s talking about.

Ginn is puking up exactly the kind of misinformation that ought to be filtered out — he’s cocky and full of himself, but he knows pretty much nothing about the subject he’s lying about.

No spiders today

I decided to get out of the house and take a walk. Everything is still dead and brown and frigid outdoors, but I had a cunning plan: I’d visit the university greenhouse! I was disappointed.

Oh, sure, there were colorful flowers.

But I was looking for spiders. The only arthropods I could find were some tiny ants scurrying all over twigs and leaves. You can’t escape ants.

There were some tantalizing dense cobwebs in a couple of close spaces, but the inhabitants weren’t hanging out. Probably lurking. I’ll have to come back and check again.

All plans fail

But usually not this spectacularly. I’m teaching two courses this term, and had to throw out the syllabus and juggle everything around, so I’m going to be feeding them lectures on YouTube, adjusting the grading, etc., and have just now finished posting summaries to the students online.

Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development:

Genetics:

Those two videos lay out pretty much the same thing. The major difference is that genetics has a lab, and no, you can’t come in and do experiments. Even I have been told I can’t! So instead, I’m pulling up old data from previous years, and I’m presenting that to them as an exercise in analysis and summarizing an experiment.

This is no fun, but at least I’m getting a grip on how to carry on.

Bengal zebrafish

I miss working in a lab with a wall of fish tanks, the water gurgling, the little fishies darting about. It was rather soothing. Spiders have their charms, but they don’t dart, or flash, or move in swirling schools, they mainly just lurk. My lab is much quieter and dryer now.

I switched to spiders because I wanted an animal to study in their natural habitat, looking for interactions with other species. As it turns out, there was an alternative: I could have moved to the Bengal region of India, which is a magical place where the experimental animals frolic in great numbers in shallow ponds, and where I could be wading knee deep in warm waters while Danio rerio nibbles at my toes, like the Jutfelt lab is doing.

I was mesmerized by this video this morning, just lying in bed watching the lovely schools of zebrafish zipping around.


Wild zebrafish in India Jutfelt Lab from Fredrik Jutfelt on Vimeo.

Spiders don’t frolic, either. They do murder small arthropods, though, in a vicious and personal way, which might better fit my mood nowadays.

They’re trying to snatch all of my joy away!

We’ve been sent a letter from our university president. As of Wednesday, 18 March, everything is shutdown. How’s this for a thorough expulsion?

As I communicated this weekend, I expect all employees to work from home by no later than Wednesday, March 18. This is not optional for faculty and staff at all levels of the organization systemwide, and I expect supervisors to honor this decision.

Not optional. This isn’t a choice for a lot of faculty who maintain live animal labs. Or the greenhouse. Or anything that requires regular maintenance.

A little further, it links to more details for us slaves to other organisms.

Each lab should develop a list of essential operations to continue ongoing experiments and research that would suffer a major impact if temporarily discontinued, such as loss of years of effort, data, or loss of a major investment. Work that maintains essential equipment and safe standby mode in labs or maintains essential samples and animal populations also meets the criteria for essential operations.

Other laboratory research is to be discontinued. The only expansion of research that is allowable during this time is research related to the COVID-19 virus.

Examples of essential operations for projects unrelated to COVID-19 include (but are not limited to): 1) maintaining liquid nitrogen levels in storage tanks, 2) maintaining ongoing animal experiments where stopping the experiment would compromise the project, 3) feeding and caring for animals, 4) maintaining critical cell cultures, and 5) processing specimens for those clinical trials that will remain open during this period.

So I’m supposed to continue all research? If I go in to throw flies at spiders, I can’t even spend an hour or two on the microscope? I really work solo most of the school year, and have a few students — if I’m lucky — in the summer.

So right now I have no family, no students, I have to do all my teaching through a computer screen, and everything is frozen outside so I can’t go spider hunting, and now they tell me I can’t even work alone in my lab? I’m just to be trapped inside my big empty house with an evil cat all day, every day? I might snap. Mary will eventually come home to a gibbering madman. Well, more gibbering and more mad than usual.

Hmm. I could bring the spider cages home, and an incubator, and at least my dissecting scope. Then Mary could come home to less gibbering, but a house full of spiders and lab gear instead.

Sacrifices. We all must make sacrifices.

Aww, heck. If Idris Elba has been diagnosed and is staying home, I have to buck up and hang on here, too.

I haven’t been tested, and can’t be — we still have too few testing kits.

On the other hand, does Idris Elba have a colony of spiders he has to take care of? I think not.

In other dismal news…

I just learned in their newsletter that the American Arachnology Society meetings are cancelled this year. Aw, darn — I was looking forward to that. The thing is, too, that they were scheduled to take place in early July, at UC Davis, so this is right now the most proactive cancellation I’ve encountered yet. Meanwhile, my university is pretending we’ll be back in business in 2½ weeks, which is rather absurdly optimistic. The other con I regularly attend in the summer is Convergence, around the end of August. There aren’t any whispers about cancelling that, at least not yet.

The AAS newsletter also has a nice article on teaching kids to be comfortable with spiders, so that’s a plus.

I think I’ll be spending the whole summer right here in Stevens County.

No plan survives contact with the enemy (or students)

When I first heard that we were going to switch to online classes, my first thought was that this will be a lot of work, but it’ll be easy, mindless work: I’ll just lift everything I do in class and plop it down on the intertubes, and I’ll send stuff home with the students so they can do their lab work there. Straightforward. A nuisance, but no, I don’t need to change my approach at all.

That lasted about 24 hours, and then I took the radical step of talking to my students. First casualty: nope, no way am I going to raise flies in my house.

Then I learned that some of my students get online routinely…but through their phone or campus computer labs. I’m sitting here in my home office with two big monitors and a fast internet connection, they might be only getting online intermittently and peering at it through a tiny screen. Whoops, no big productions of my hour-long lectures. No required online sessions.

So, today, I rethink and refocus. I’m going back to the syllabus and figuring out exactly what concepts I have to get across to the students to prepare them for the next course in the curriculum (for introductory biology) or grad school/professional life/existence as an informed citizen (for genetics). I have to deliver those concepts to the student who has minimal internet access.

That means — oh no — I have to rely much, much more on the textbook. I have to be the guide, rather than the source, of the information. I can’t expect the students to absorb knowledge on a schedule, but instead, have to point them to information and tell them what my expectations are, and give them the freedom to meet them on a flexible schedule.

It’s a lot of compromises and not entirely satisfactory, and I look forward to someday returning to the normal world where students and I actually see and interact with each other in person. Until then, though, I have to make sure the goals of my courses are reached, somehow.

The realistic perspective

My university has closed all face-to-face classes until 1 April, when, I presume, they’ll reassess what should be done. I hope no one thinks everything will be over then, because it won’t be. We’re just getting started. I expect April is when the pandemic in the US will be just roaring into action.

Some experts agree.

40-70% of the US population will be infected over the next 12-18 months. After that level you can start to get herd immunity. Unlike flu this is entirely novel to humans, so there is no latent immunity in the global population.
[We used their numbers to work out a guesstimate of deaths— indicating about 1.5 million Americans may die. The panelists did not disagree with our estimate. This compares to seasonal flu’s average of 50K Americans per year. Assume 50% of US population, that’s 160M people infected. With 1% mortality rate that’s 1.6M Americans die over the next 12-18 months.]
The fatality rate is in the range of 10X flu.
This assumes no drug is found effective and made available.
The death rate varies hugely by age. Over age 80 the mortality rate could be 10-15%.
Don’t know whether COVID-19 is seasonal but if is and subsides over the summer, it is likely to roar back in fall as the 1918 flu did

There is no guarantee that this will be a replay of the 1918 pandemic, but we should prepare as if it is. I’m teaching cell biology in the fall, I’m going to spend the summer getting organized for possibly having to teach it online.

I hope that’s all I have to do, and we’re not going to end up preparing by digging trenches for mass graves.

This next recommendation is personally bothersome. My wife flew to Colorado before the extent of the crisis became unavoidably obvious. She was supposed to fly back next week. Flying is out of the question anymore, so we’ve been trying to come up with alternative methods of getting her back home.

We would say “Anyone over 60 stay at home unless it’s critical”. CDC toyed with idea of saying anyone over 60 not travel on commercial airlines.

Right now we’re considering that instead maybe she should stay in Boulder with my daughter for some indefinite period of time. Safety apart is smarter than travel together that maximizes our chance of infection.