The Harvest

When I want to hide from the news, I’ve always got bugs to tend. I’ve been neglecting my mealworm colony, so this morning I cleaned it out — it was mostly full of frass, which explains why my harvest was a bit low. Here’s today’s collection.

The frass is in the compost, I scooped up a handful of the larvae to feed the spiders today, and the rest got dumped into a couple pounds of fresh cornmeal with an overripe banana as a treat.

I’ve got to expand this colony, just in case the situation in America becomes even more dire, and I need a source of healthy protein for myself, not just the spiders.

You can’t blame the spider!

Well, this is a fascinating example of spider toxicity. A heroin addict, looking for a cheap high or a weird story to tell her friends, ground up a black widow spider in a little water and…injected it intravenuously. I’ve heard of people eating strange dangerous things on a dare, but mainlining it takes it to a whole new level. Don’t do that!

The consequences were unpleasant but fortunately not lethal.

Several hours after arriving at the hospital, the woman began to have trouble breathing. Her wheezing became so severe that she was moved to the intensive care unit (ICU).

The diagnosis: Doctors determined that the patient’s symptoms were triggered by the black widow’s toxic venom, they wrote in a report. Black widow venom is known to disrupt signals in the nervous system, thus causing muscle pain and spasms, rapid heartbeat and high blood pressure. In some cases, it leads to inflammation that can ultimately restrict breathing, according to Harvard Medical School. The patient had asthma, and the physicians suspected that her breathing difficulties may have been worsened by an allergic reaction to a protein found in the venom.

Notably, when a black widow bites, it injects a very low volume of venom. Because the woman ground up the whole spider, she may have exposed herself to a dose orders of magnitude higher than is typical. A black widow’s venom glands hold about 0.2 milligrams of venom, on average.

The treatment: Doctors gave the woman an IV solution of calcium gluconate, a medication that can help relieve muscle cramps, but her symptoms did not improve significantly. Next, she received morphine for pain relief. The ICU doctors attempted to reduce her wheezing with three treatments of albuterol, a drug that relaxes airway muscles and is a common remedy for asthma. When those treatments were ineffective, they switched to methylprednisolone, a steroid medication. But her labored breathing continued, and the next day, she required a nebulizer. Doctors then gave her morphine and lorazepam — a type of depressant — to ease her muscle spasms and cramping.

Antivenin, or antivenom, for black widow bites carries a risk of anaphylaxis, a severe and immediate allergic reaction. Since the patient was already having trouble breathing, and the doctors suspected that antivenin would worsen her respiratory distress, they did not include it in her treatment.

By the second day of treatment, the patient’s breathing had returned to normal, her lungs were unobstructed and her muscle pain was gone. The doctors transferred her to a general ward and discharged her a day later. They instructed her to follow her standard regimen for controlling her asthma and suggested that she take oral steroids to control any lingering inflammation.

Did they also suggest that she not shoot up any more spiders?

For some reason, a lot of people have been sending me this story. Do I look like the kind of person who would inject themselves with spider venom? Are they warning me not to do this? I assure you all, I like spiders too much to want to grind one up.

Although…I do have several spiders of various species that died of natural causes, and are now floating in vials of 95% alcohol. They could be an interesting addition to a cocktail of some sort, don’t you think?

Not how it actually works

I can’t relate to this cartoon — it’s too impractical.

We do not have a food delivery service in Morris.

I do not buy bugs in a store. Well, I will occasionally buy a few crickets from the pet store in town or waxworms from a bait shop, but those are just special treats.

I have a big tank in the basement where I raise swarms of mealworms (they’re easy!) and an incubator at my lab where I’ve got tens of thousands of fruit flies.

I am beginning to suspect that the cartoonist doesn’t actually have much experience with raising a house full of invertebrates.

Australians don’t fool me

A new species of funnel web spider has been discovered in Australia — the largest of its kind, and possibly the most venomous, most deadly spider in the world. The news reports, though, aren’t full of scary stories and people going “ooh eek, kill it with fire” stuff. The words you’ll hear in this short report are “happy” and “proud”.

I’m beginning to think I might have been born in the wrong country.

Lunch has been served

We all had something tasty for lunch

I spent some time with the spiders this afternoon, who were all extremely appreciative of the plump mealworms I gave them, devouring them immediately. I also learned something: I’ve often noticed that they will back away from their prey and then scurry back to their meal, as if they’d briefly entertained second thoughts. No, that’s not what they are doing. When I looked closely, I saw that they were attaching a thick webbing cable, practically a ribbon, and then attaching it to another strong cable in their existing web. It’s all part of securing a strong prey animal. I have a short video clip of this behavior on Patreon. These mealworms are strong — I saw one getting wrapped and bucking so hard it was lifting up the whole cobweb, which was attached to a wooden frame.

Then I came home for a fabulous Christmas lunch, a peanut butter and honey sandwich, the honey a gift from Karl and Ariela Haro von Mogel, of Biofortified. Thanks, guys!

You think spider sex is crazy?

I beg to differ about spider sex — it’s perfectly normally weird, but then I have been spending a fair amount of time trying to encourage spiders to have sex. Mainly what I’m concerned about is that it’s too infrequent, and they seem to have seasonal depression. But OK, it is interesting, as this video demonstrates.

You know what’s kinky, though? The video mentions that “some flies have a female who penetrates the male to collect sperm”. Not spiders, but barklice (Neotrogla), which aren’t flies and aren’t lice, but a kind of true bug, have completely reversed sex roles.

The female has a penis-like protrusion called a gynosome, which is erectile and curved. The male has no such organ; he has an internal chamber instead. When she penetrates him during sex, he delivers sperm into a duct in her gynosome, which leads to a storage organ. He still ejaculates, but he does so inside his own body, not hers.

Neotrogla sex can last for days, so it’s important for the duo to stabilise themselves. The female does it by inflating the base of her gynosome inside the male. It’s covered in patches of tiny spines, which help to anchor her in place for her sexual marathon. You can find similar spines on the penises of many male animals where they provide extra stimulation during sex (as in cats, mice and chimps) or inflict horrendous wounds on the females (as in the seed beetle).

In Neotrogla, the spines are such good anchors that it’s impossible to separate a mating pair without killing the male. As Yoshizawa writes, “Pulling apart coupled specimens (N. curvata; n = 1) led to separation of the male abdomen from the thorax without breaking the genital coupling.” In other words: We tried yanking one pair apart; it didn’t work and the male kinda broke.

See? Spiders are perfectly ordinary, mundane, familiar little creatures. No pegging involved.

Sexual dimorphism — it’s scary

This is a female Latrodectus mactans.

This is a male Latrodectus mactans.

I brought them together this morning. The female is plump and mature. The male has large, engorged palps. This is what they look like together.

They did not mate today, although the male spent a lot of time scurrying around and tentatively plucking at the web. At least she didn’t eat him. I put a video of the anxious, fruitless male on my Patreon.

I left them to honeymoon overnight. I’ll check on them tomorrow.

Sproing-oing-oing!

This spider has a neat trick. It builds a typical orb web, but then it gets behind it and draws it back, like a slingshot…and when it hears a bug buzzing by, it releases it to spring forward and entangle it’s prey.

A) Untensed web shown from front view. (B) Tensed web shown from side view.

It can hear mosquitos and are triggered when on buzzes within range.

As for the web kinematics, Han and Blackledge determined that they can accelerate up to 504 m/s2, reaching speeds as high as 1 m/s, and hence can catch mosquitos in 38 milliseconds or less. Even the speediest mosquitoes might struggle to outrun that.

I haven’t seen any, but their range is basically holarctic — I would like to encourage them to move in around my house.