I tried sorting out spiders. They were not cooperative.

This afternoon, I tried to sort out the newly emerged Bold Jumper spiderlings, with limited success. Unfortunately, they were faster and more eager to flee than I expected. I got most of them, but a few are now living in my house.

(The video will premiere tomorrow at 4pm, so you’ll have to wait to see it. Or if you’re a Patreon subscriber you can see it now.)

I didn’t even know she was pregnant

It’s Friday, feeding day in the lab, and I went in this morning to throw wingless flies and mealworms at the horde, all the Steatoda borealis and Latrodectus mactans. I also have one adorable little Bold Jumper, Phidippus audax, that I keep around not because I have experiments in mind, but because she’s cute. Jumping spiders are always adorable. Of course I have to feed her, too.

I tossed in a mealworm, which she instantly devoured, when I noticed…hey, what are all these little dark dots all over the place? She had a silky refuge that she often disappeared into, and now I know that she was nurturing an egg sac. I hadn’t seen it, but apparently it popped in the last day or two.

Here’s a baby Bold Jumper.

Suddenly, I have lots. I put a whole lot of fruit flies into the container to keep them entertained for now…later I’ll have to separate them out into vials.

I ventured into the jungle…I mean, garden

I was feeling a bit robust this morning, and managed to hobble all the way out to the backyard, where I could explore the fauna thriving there. Mary was hovering at my elbow to make sure I didn’t topple over, but I did OK — another week or two, and I might be going on real walks (as long as I don’t do anything stupid.) Things I saw that made me happy:

We spotted two monarch butterflies flitting over the garden. No photos, though, they didn’t land and pose for me.

The place is hopping with grasshoppers, which, while not normally associated with good gardens, is fine with me — the purpose of the garden is making spider food, not tomatoes. Mary may disagree with me.

Oh, and it was so bright. I’m not used to that anymore.

We also had lots of interesting pollinators, like this two-spotted longhorn bee.

Of course, the queen of the garden, the devourer of grasshoppers, the true monarch, was Argiope trifasciata.

It’s a fine crop, and congratulations to Mary on her superlative gardening skills. Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it to the front yard to see what wonders flourish there.

Baby black widows!

Finally, the black widow egg sacs have released their hordes!

Here’s a close-up of one of the spiderlings. Black widows start off with more spectacular patterns — as they mature, they’ll get red and yellow bands and racing stripes, before turning solid black with a blotch of red on the abdomen.

Pretty!

I thought I was going to miss out this year

The peak season for Argiope is late summer, and I’ve been physically wrecked for all of August, so I’d resigned myself to not seeing any of these big beautiful spiders this year. Then Mary went out to the garden to pick tomatoes, and there, right there in my back yard, is Argiope aurantia nestled down in our rather weedy crop!

Strictly speaking, I haven’t actually seen one yet — Mary took an iPhone photo of one. It’s 5 or 6 meters from my back door, which is out of my current range, but I can aspire to hobble out there sometime in the next few days, I think. It gives me something to aim for, anyway.

An exciting Friday morning!

I got to go outside! Actually, I had to go outside, since I have a ravenous population of spiders in my lab that must be fed, or there will be consequences. The one problem is that I’m still stuck in a wheelchair, which turned out to be almost no problem at all. The only steps I had to deal with were 3 short steps just outside my back door, and the rest of the way was all ramps, all the way to the science building elevator. Then, of course, I had my assistant Mary to push me there and back.

Actual photo of Mary helping me navigate the science building this morning.

The only real problem was that, as always it seems, we had another major thunderstorm roll through, with skies dark as night and thunder and lightning and a drenching rain. I think it’s fine that my return to the lab would be heralded with spooky nightmare weather.

Now the spiders are all snug in their webs, happily crunching through mealworms and flies, and all is right in the world.

Imagine finding a 10 foot long sausage

And deciding to try starting at one end and eating the whole thing. This is the bold jumper, Phidippus audax, that I’m raising in the lab (I’ve got 6 different species of spider thriving there), and I gave her a large mealworm which did not intimidate her in the least — she’s bold, remember. This is a pattern with her. She starts eating a big mealworm, and gets full halfway through, and I’ll have to clean up half-eaten corpses in a couple of day.

(I know, not a great photo, but it was shot through some dirty plexiglas so that’s as clean as I could get it.)

Spider apocalypse

Last year, I would go outside in the early morning, when the dew was on the grass, and see my yard dappled with grass spider webs. Dozens of them!

My yard was a village full of these little tent-like structures.They would appear in July through August, and I’d also see the grass spiders steadily taking over other micro-environments, creeping up the walls of my house and displacing the Parasteatoda who had been living there in early summer. I wasn’t thrilled about that — grass spiders were ubiquitous and so common that I would rather see more interesting spiders.

But this year…I went outside around 6:30am on a humid (but cool) summer day, and could see all the grass and clover dotted dew. What I didn’t see was grass spiders. Zero spiders. No webs. It’s August! This is prime spider population time, and my familiar little friends are gone. This is the first time in my 25 years here that they’ve been absent.

I missed an opportunity. If I’d been tracking these things all along, I’d have an easy metric to tally a sample of the spider numbers — if I’d counted last year, I’d guess the daily numbers in August would have been between 20 and 30 grass spider webs in my lawn, but I didn’t because I assumed they’d always be there. So I’ll have to start tracking now. The number is…ZERO.

On the bright side, the number can only go up from here. Or stay dead forever.

Maybe it’s just a weird seasonal fluctuation? Why would all the spiders disappear from a lawn with a diverse plant population, never in all these years years treated with pesticides of any kind? WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THIS PLANET?