Work, work, work, work

I played hooky last year, taking two semesters off (at half-pay, ouch) for this thing called a sabbatical. As it turns out, my university expects me to justify and explain myself and tell them what I did with my lazy time off, and I guess it’s not enough to fire off a quick note saying that I was playing with spiders. So now today I’m late for the division holiday party because I had to hammer out a longer rationalization. OK, sure, so I include it here, too, as well as mailing it off to my dean and division chair.

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That’s one beautiful spider

Latrodectus umbukwane is a breath-takingly gorgeous spider from South Africa. Look at those colors!

As you might guess from the genus, it’s related to black widows, which means of course everyone gets worked up about its potential venomous nature. It hasn’t bitten anyone that we know of! Get over it! It seems to be, if anything, unusually shy.

Also, you want to see some sexual dimorphism? Take a look at this.

I am not impressed with your anti-spider bigotry, Science Times

Well, this is a stupid sensationalist headline: New Species of Spider Found in Mexico Able to Rot Human Flesh. Yeah, so? This is a common property of many venoms, such as those in some wasps and snakes, and it makes sense that a spider, which relies on injecting toxins and enzymes that break down cells and tissues, would do so. How else would they slurp out the digested guts of their prey? These spiders have no interest in eating people, or “rotting human flesh”, so it’s an obnoxious way to distort the story.

I can just imagine spider tabloids running stories title “New Species of Primate Found With Large Fleshy Butts Capable of Crushing Innocent Spiders”. It completely misses the story.

Here’s a pic of the lovely beast in question.

It’s called Loxosceles tenochtitlan, and it’s distinguishing characteristic is not that it has a remarkable venom, but that males and females have unique genitals in a lock-and-key arrangement, which is also common in invertebrates.

In a statement released by the university, Valdez-Mondragon explained the difference: “As L.tenochtitlan is morphologically similar to L.misteca, it was initially thought that it had been introduced to this region by the shipping of ornamental plants. But when doing molecular biology studies of both species, we realized that they are different.” Valdez-Mondragon described the species and noted the difference between L.tenochtitlan and L.misteca lies in the male spider’s palp or the organ that enables touch in arachnids. It is also noted that the female L.tenochtitlan has a distinct looking sexual organ compared to L.misteca. Valdez-Mondragon explains that at first glance, the two species of spiders can look identical, but L.tenochtitlan can be identified because of its dark brown color which is dull compared to the other species and on its back is a very visible violin pattern.

The story goes on to claim that “humans are naturally repulsed at the sight of “creepy crawlies” like spiders.”

The Science Times is not one of my approved popular science sites. Too much trash written by people who have only the most passing acquaintance with science.

Date night at the spider house

I have been neglecting my spiders this week — every day I get a little time with them, and then I realize I have to get grading done, and then I have to regretfully leave the lab to hunch over papers again. It’s unfortunate, too, because this is the week I’ve been trying to get them to breed, and there’s courtship to watch.

A little background: last year I had limited success with breeding because I was raising all the spiders in these 3cm diameter tubes, which is convenient and allows me to pack a lot of spiders into an incubator. The catch was that mating was fraught; put a male in a tube with a female and it was going to end in violence and cannibalism more often than not. Imagine that you wanted to study human courtship and mating, and your strategy was to keep women in those little capsule hotels, with plenty of food and water, and then every once in a while you picked some random guy and stuffed him into a capsule with a random woman, and then you planted a camera in the window to watch the fun. At best you’re going to see a strange and unrealistic version of mating…at worst, violence and death. Maybe cannibalism if you’re really lucky.

This year, I’m raising females in spacious cages where they can build large webs, and where there’s space to scamper off and be alone. I’m introducing males to these female-dominated spaces, and…well, so far it’s been less than exciting. It’s more like watching a junior high school dance. There’s a girl, hanging out over by the wall. Boy comes in to the gym, they notice each other, they look warily at one another. Their body language all says “I see you”, but they’re so nervous that you can’t tell whether they’re happy to see each other, or they’re threatening to vomit all over their shoes if they get too close.

The boy works up his nerve and approaches cautiously, sending as many friendly signals as he can. In spiders, this involves web plucking; they send vibrations down the web to each other. “Pluck pluck pluck?” he says. She fretfully replies “Pluck pluck pluckity pluck.” Is this promising? The boy is uncertain. “Pluck pluck,” he says, and reaches out with one arm, tentatively. “PLUCK!” she screams, and charges. Boy runs away. “Pluck pluck pluckin’ pluck pluck,” she hisses, in her position near the punch.

At least, that’s how I interpret this one encounter I watched.

We start out with the male spider center right; he’s advancing towards the female, top left, just out of view at first. He’s been plucking up a storm just before the clip, and both are slightly agitated. He reaches out to her and…devastating rebuff. He flees. She settles down, but continues to pluck at the web…sort of angrily, if I anthropomorphize. When he begins to approach again (off screen), she rushes out to chase him away.

I left the two of them alone after that. There was enough space in the cage that they could separate safely, and he was quick to run away, so she’d have to be strongly determined to kill and eat him to pursue, and I’d put plenty of fruit flies in the cage beforehand, so she wouldn’t be that hungry. I came back the next morning (it was like a junior high dance with a lock-in, and no chaperones!) and rescued the male, who was hovering maybe 6cm away, body oriented to the female and looking attentive. I have no idea if mating was accomplished.

That’s been my week. Introduce potential breeding pairs, watch a little angsty teen dating drama, scurry away to grade papers, come back to find two spiders staring at each other, giving no hint about what they’d been up to.

“How was your date, son?” “It was alright, I guess,” he replies, sullenly.

“How was your date, daughter?” She screeches angrily in spider. I don’t know what that means.

Good news! The male was left overnight with New Arya, one of my females who has built a cozy little nest with scraps of debris. When I just checked on them, the male was right outside the nest, tapping. New Arya was reaching out and waving at him. I decided to just leave him there a little longer and see what develops.

Also, Texanne of the triangulosa clan had made another egg sac. That’s three for her.

Why couldn’t this have come out earlier in the semester?

At the beginning of the term, I was constantly repeating the mantra, “your data is your data” to the students — they came in expecting that science experiments had a foreordained conclusion, like a recipe that you followed and at the end you got cake. If there was no cake it’s a failure! That’s not true, though, that even if it doesn’t end up as you expected, it was still data. Unexpected data just takes more work to interpret (they don’t like that part) or that you need to do more experiments to puzzle out how it happened (they like that even less).

I’m grading lab reports now, and can say that they seem to have figured it out. They’ve stopped judging their results and are instead asking questions and analyzing, which is all I really want.

This would have been a good comic to include in their training early on, though.

Thinking about Xmas presents for the family, on a budget

You know, you have to love the look of joy on their faces when they open a surprise box. I imagine it would be like the Australians who opened a box intended for nesting opossums and saw this:

I know I’d be excited. Wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately, there’s a shortage of Huntsman spiders here in Minnesota. We’ve got lots of Pholcus, though. I’m thinking of going down into the basement and scooping up a swarm of cellar spiders, putting them in a gift-wrapped box with a ribbon, and mailing them off to the grandkids.

How can they not be delighted?

The Spherical Spider

I have not been advertising this aspect of my research, but I have been striving towards developing a Perfectly Spherical Spider. Here’s my first success.

What good is a spherical spider, you might ask. The benefits are legion. For one, think of their utility in physics problems.

Actually, what happened is that I’ve started trying to breed the spiders with my impoverished bunch of small, young males, and because I was concerned about preventing nuptial cannibalism, I gave the lovely females a big banquet on their wedding night, and boy did they eat. It may have worked against me, because a) this female hasn’t budged in a couple of days, and I don’t think she can move, and b) the male I put in her cage gave every appearance of being fascinated and terrified, and orbited her at a distance of 5-10 cm. I’m hoping he might have darted in at some point over the weekend and done the deed, but who knows? I’ve pulled him out now and will place him with a possibly less intimidating female.

Isn’t she lovely, though?

Physicists: they make silken draglines, you could probably use spherical spiders in pendulum problems, too. You can’t do that with spherical cows!

George Church has a fancy hammer. You’re all looking a bit like nails right now

George Church is a smart and interesting guy, and now he’s been featured on 60 Minutes. It’s a strange interview, though, and I don’t believe a lot of his claims.

Yeah, right, a dating app based on your genes. I don’t believe it, except as an ambitious eugenics program to give scientists an excuse to do social engineering with fallacious premises. There is such a thing already, as in, for instance, screening in some Jewish communities for lethal alleles; beyond that specific use, though, I don’t see much point in caring about minor variations…unless you want to suppress them. That was only a small part of the program, though, highlighted by CBS because it is so radical and sensational. One thing he does go on at length about is his biomedical goals: “Today, his lab is working to make humans immune to all viruses, eliminate genetic diseases, and reverse the effects of time.”

I have two objections to his dream.

  • I think he’s forgotten about this phenomenon called evolution. Viruses are going to be evolving much more rapidly than he can engineer humans; humans are going to mutate faster than he can tweak their genes.

  • He disregards multifactorial interactions, and seems to think there’s a straightforward linear scale of gene effects that can be optimized. We don’t know whether, for instance, increasing longevity genetically is going to have secondary undesirable genetic effects. It’s definitely going to have horrible effects socially, but those don’t exist in Church’s world.

None of that is an argument for stopping his kind of research, which I think has great benefits as well. I just don’t think he’s very good at thinking outside of an imagined linear progression.

Also troubling was his response to one question. On everything else, he’s glib and confident, and then he got asked about the ethics of accepting money from Jeffrey Epstein…and suddenly he’s hesitating and stammering and clearly trying to think of a way out of this question. His answer is that he can’t be expected to screen donors that rigorously, and that tainted money can be used for good ends, as, for instance, the way tobacco money was used to sponsor legitimate research.

Does he stop to consider that there’s a problem in a system that allows large corporations to thrive on lies and addicting innocent people to dangerous chemicals, and that maybe such organizations are not the best to control what sciences get funding? No.

His is a lab that thrives on huge donations from extremely wealthy people, and getting featured on 60 Minutes is going to raise his profile and probably bring in more donations from extremely wealthy people. That ought to be raising all kinds of concerns about the nature of a system that relies on excesses of wealth in certain classes of people who then have the privilege of distributing some of that wealth in a pattern of personal patronage. That he is the current recipient of such largesse apparently makes it impossible for him to see the flaws in that system.