It’s the Spider Purge!

Oh, no. My daughter and granddaughter are coming to visit for a week on Friday, and my wife has decided we have to make a more baby-friendly home. Which means…THE SPIDERS MUST GO. I tell her that the spiders were here first, so maybe it’s the baby who should make accommodations. That didn’t work. The baby will need to learn to love spiders eventually, so why not start early? No go. Maybe the baby would like to learn spider-catching technique, so you’re depriving her of a learning opportunity. Nope. So Mary’s been out in the sun room, destroying a happy, loving community by scooping up spiders and their many egg sacs, and has brought them to me. At least I’ve got a nice home for them in the lab.

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A successful Skeptiprom

Neglected spaces are neat. The hotel I’m at is not neglected, so it’s kind of barren of spiders…except that there’s one unused space deep in the bowels of the building, which used to be a sports bar, and there’s a back side of that that has been totally ignored for at least a year, and the cobwebs are dense and beautiful, so I got to spend a little time poking around with my arthropod friends, rather than sitting awkwardly in a corner nursing a drink and wallowing in self-loathing as I usually do at social events. See, there’s hope for us nerds someday!

I found a date for Skeptiprom!

I usually skip this event at Skepticon, the Skeptiprom. I’m kind of a wallflower, and I don’t dance, but this year, I have a reason to go.

It was a good day. I did my usual spiderwalk, and found that the outside of the federal building (yes, I got stopped by the police again) was populated with these furrowed orb weavers everywhere. I caught a few, they were impressive.

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News from home

I’m away from my wife this weekend, but she knows what important things are happening in Morris and is keeping me up to date on the essential news.

The swarm of caterpillars that have been gnawing on the milkweed she planted are pupating all over the house!

Now you know, too.

St Louis got spiders!

I am so relieved. If they didn’t, this trip to Skepticon would have been a total waste of time.

I knew there would be, of course. Although, I took a stroll around the hotel, and it was a wasteland — it looked like the exterior had been hosed down recently, and even the few cobwebs I found were sad tattered shreds. Then I discovered the federal building behind us, and man, the windows there are dense with webs. I saw big ol’ orb weavers hanging out in massive webs that covered an entire picture window pane, and lots of my little pals, Parasteatoda, lurking in the corners. I caught a few, like the male above, that I’ll take home to start a Missouri colony. I’ll go back later and get some more.

One downside is that if you’re hanging about a federal building with a big camera with a long lens, and you keep peering at windows, I guess you look a bit suspicious. A policeman stopped by to ask, “Uh, what are you doing?” I told him, and he watched as I scooped up one in a vial, so I think he believed me. Also, it helps to look like an old white nerd (it shouldn’t, but it does. I also don’t have a Russian accent.)

Oh, and hey, the Skepticon conference starts this afternoon — the young people who organize it apparently don’t believe in getting up before 11am, so you’ve got plenty of time to get down here. Sure, go ahead, you’ve got time to look for spiders before the events start up.

Leaving my Minnesota spiders behind?

It’s a travel day. I’m getting ready to go to St Louis for Skepticon, which means the usual process — packing, making sure I’ve got the materials for my workshop, feeding the spiders. You’ve all been through it.

I thought this would be a weekend without spiders, but then I realized…they’re everywhere. I’m bringing my camera, some collecting vials, and a headlamp in my gear, and am thinking I might go looking for some Missouri Parasteatoda to bring back to the lab. Any other Skepticon attendees interested in a Spider Safari sometime?

I did have to get in a last minute spider fix, though. I think this uncooperative little lady (she’s young and a bit shy) is Neoscona, but I’ll be returning her back to the garden before I leave.

This handsome gentleman is Steatoda borealis. I’ve been seeing a lot of these lately — they seem to be thriving in slightly harsher environments than Parasteatoda. I like them a lot, and am going to try raising them in the lab, even though Parasteatoda is a more popular model organism.

He’s not being set free. I’m taking him to the lab this morning, where his fate is to provide stud service.

Don’t blame the octopus

This poor woman thought it would be funny to pose for a photo with a small octopus on her face. The octopus disagreed, and bit her.

“And I’m still in pain,” said Bisceglia. “I’m on three different antibiotics. This can come and go, the swelling, for months they say.” She says the whole painful experience taught her a valuable lesson about handling a live octopus.

“This was not a good idea,” said Bisceglia. “I will never do it again.”

That’s one reason they have venoms, you know, besides streamlining the killing of prey. Never do it again. Also, tell all your friends if you survive that they shouldn’t disturb the octopus.

Isn’t evolution grand?

Spiderzilla

We found one unusual spider today, and she was frustrating. First thing we noticed about her: she looked like our familiar Parasteatoda, except that she was half again, maybe twice the size of the house spiders we usually see. She was also relatively lightly colored, compared to the mottled brown of our familiar friends. So I caught her, with the idea that I might be able to more closely examine her in the lab. Hah. This was the most frantically active spider I’ve ever had to work with, scrabbling non-stop at the sides of the vial. I tried everything to get her to hold still and let me do some close-ups and measurements — she was having none of that.

I put her in a vial, I put her in a small petri dish to confine her. Nothing worked.

I finally just let her out to scurry about on my hand — I thought if nothing else, it would help give some perspective on her size. Have you ever tried to focus a camera and keep a spider in view as it is running all over your hand, and while you’re trying to make sure it doesn’t escape? She wasn’t cooperative at all.

One alternative, one a real arachnologist wouldn’t balk at, would be to kill and fix her, maybe even do a little dissection. The thing is…I’ve never killed a spider, not even in my lab work, and I’d like to maintain that record. I’m a biologist, dammit, I study life, not death, and while I’ve killed flies, fish, kittens, rabbits, mice, dogs, and goats in the line of duty, I’d rather not, thank you very much, and if I can study living animals without harming them, I’d rather do that. I’m sure I’ll eventually have to do some of the dirty wicked killing business with adult spiders, but I’ll put that off as long as I can.

Anyway, I think I exhausted her eventually, and she just wanted to curl up and hang off the end of a brush. I still couldn’t get her into the orientation I wanted.

My current plan: I’ve put her in a large vial, fed her some flies, and hope she spins a nice cobweb in there. Once she’s hanging from a nice strong web frame, I might be able to rotate the vial around and get a better shot of her.

Babbies!

We were making the rounds on our spider survey today, and came across many scenes like this. The egg sacs are opening and releasing clouds of adorable little babbies!

Mom is hanging out down below, gnawing on haunch of arthropod. Families! So precious!

The new Lysenkoism

Some science conflicts with Republican ideology, so it must be suppressed.

One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice is losing nutrients because of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize media coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.

I don’t think it was that groundbreaking. When I got here to UMM twenty years ago and started listening to plant biologists, this was a common and accepted conundrum: plants grown in CO2 enriched atmospheres would thrive happily but they were making more carbohydrates, which require only carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight, but things like proteins, which also require nitrogen, were being synthesized at the same or lower rate. You’d get loads of carbs at the expense of all the other nutrients we like in our food. Ziska may have been one of the plant physiologists who first advanced this concern — I wouldn’t know, it’s way outside my field — but what he is saying is not controversial or unusual now.

Well, not controversial to scientists. To politicians with an ideological anti-science axe to grind, it’s data that must be buried.

Ziska, in describing his decision to leave, painted a picture of a department in constant fear of the president and Secretary Sonny Perdue’s open skepticism about broadly accepted climate science, leading officials to go to extremes to obscure their work to avoid political blowback. The result, he said, is a vastly diminished ability for taxpayer-funded scientists to provide farmers and policymakers with important information about complex threats to the global food supply.

Ziska, or “Lew” as he’s known to his colleagues, has researched plants at USDA across five administrations, Republican and Democratic, contributing significantly to the country’s understanding of how rising carbon dioxide levels and changing temperatures affect everything from crops to noxious weeds and even plants grown to make illicit drugs.

The shifts in the USDA seem petty and trivial now, but they all add up to an effort to promote obscurantism when the science contradicted the political dogma of the right.

“We were careful,” he said. “And then it got to the point where language started to change. No one wanted to say climate change, you would say ‘climate uncertainty’ or you would say ‘extreme events.’ Or you would use whatever euphemism was available to not draw attention.”

Ziska said there was never a department memo that directed legions of USDA scientists to be more careful with their language, it was simply well understood.

The signals to scientists have been subtle but frequent. For example, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which funnels hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to colleges and universities for food and agriculture research has dropped the term “climate change” from its requests for applications from scientists. Instead, the agency uses “climate variability and change.”

Practically every science textbook in the country — every one I’ve ever used, anyway — will have a section on the history of genetics that will mention Lysenko, the Soviet politician who was convinced that he could adapt any plant to the harsh Russian winters by vernalization, treating the seeds with exposure to cold so that they would acquire cold resistant traits. It didn’t work, but that didn’t stop him from promoting his wishful thinking, and getting the Soviet administration to censor (and imprison) people who pointed out the evidence was against him.

It’s interesting that we were all trained on this lesson with an example that involves climate and biology, and yet here we are, led by people who apparently never cracked an introductory science textbook, or they’d realize they’re repeating history.