I’m getting outta here!

Classes start in one week (there are also way too many meetings this week), and I’ve been housebound far too long, so this weekend is my last chance to escape for a bit before the crunch hits. And then I discover there’s an Exotic Pet Fair in Eau Claire this weekend. Perfect! It’s a twofer — I get to visit my granddaughter, and take her with us to go spider shopping. I’m in the market for a nice show tarantula for the lab, and maybe a black widow or two.

It’s not all spiders. They also have birds, reptiles, bunnies, guinea pigs, etc., so even a kid who isn’t that much into spiders should be entertained. I’ll also be glad to just get out for a day.

(Don’t worry — I’ll consult with experts, and won’t be getting any endangered species. If we get Latrodectus,I think I can keep them reliably confined. I don’t want to go do down in history as the guy who populated the basement with black widows, like the former professor who let cockroaches loose in the building.)

Poor kid

An 8-year old boy in Bolivia picked up a black widow spider and urged it to bite him (this isn’t as easy as you think, black widows are shy and reluctant to bite) because he wanted to become Spider-Man. This is a worthy goal, but his methods weren’t particularly effective. A doctor explained:

“These black spiders with red backs are black widows. They do not cause anyone to become Spider-Man—on the contrary, they are putting lives at risk,” Vásquez said.

The kid is fine, but this has happened before!

In 2020, a similar case occurred in the rural Bolivian town of Chayanta, in the Andean region of Potosí, involving three children aged 8, 10 and 12 respectively. The trio provoked a black widow spider to bite them with the same objective. Doctors also managed to successfully treat the children in that incident as well.

Clearly, further public education is necessary. The children of South America must have it explained to them that the procedure requires a radioactive spider.

Hey, any millionaires/billionaires out there want to shovel money at me to feed spiders radioactive food and allow them to bite me?

Progress in embryo analysis!

Our new development in spider development is pretty basic stuff. We’re dechorionating embryos! That is, stripping off a thin membrane surrounding the embryo, so we can do staining and fixation and various other things. It’s a standard invertebrate technique — it turns out you can remove it by just washing them in bleach. Look, it works! This is a Parasteatoda embryo.

We’re still tinkering with the timing of the treatment. Five minutes is way too long, which basically dissolved the whole embryo. All it takes is a brief wash to break the chorion down. We’re also working out methods for manipulating them — they’re tiny! Just pipetting them into a solution is a great way to lose them. We’re now using a cut off microfuge tube to make a cylinder that we cap with a sheet of fine nylon mesh, to lower them into the solution. Of course, then we have to separate the embryos from the mesh. Fortunately, we opened up one egg sac and 140 embryos rolled out, so we have lots of material to experiment on.

The next question is whether they survive our abuse. We’ve got some of them sitting under a microscope, time-lapsing their response. We’ll see if they grow…or die and fall apart.

Harnessing insomnia for the greater good

My wife and I tend to wake up far too early — just this morning she was complaining that she woke up at 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep. Me, I’m a lazy bones who snoozed until 4:30am.

But here’s a possibility: there are spiders that go hunting for sleeping prey at night, the Enoplognatha, or candy-striped spiders. All we need to do is get our boots on, gulp down some coffee, and drive out to a few places we know of that are frequented by hapless pollinators. Actually, maybe we should be checking out our backyard garden in late evening/early morning.

You know, you could help out, too. They’re pretty little spiders.

Today I am Death

As mentioned, my task for this morning was murdering spiders. Mission accomplished, and now I feel terrible.

It was a simple procedure. I put the vials of happy gamboling spiders into the refrigerator to calm them down and numb them — I gave them about 15 minutes of chill. Then I went into each vial with a paintbrush and teased them out, and they descended into a tube of icy, pre-cooled alcohol, where they died within minutes. Now their bodies are packed into a freezer, awaiting delivery to the person who will chop them up.

The worst part was going through the assortment of spiders in the colony and having to choose which ones would die.

You have to understand that this was the very first time I’ve had to kill an adult spider. I’ve been wiping out embryos right and left, and I’ve had adults die of natural causes — but actually terminating their existence by my hand? Unpleasant. I like my spiders lively and interesting. I’m a biologist, not a necrologist.

Learn something about Steatoda!

Here you go, an excellent introduction to the spiders I work on, the false widows.

I should probably require all my students to watch it, because it strikes a good balance on something I struggle with: venom. I tell my students it’s medically significant, a bite can hurt, and the venom can make you sick, but at the same time I tell them I’ve never been bitten, I handle them all the time, and as long as you’re gentle, there’s no real danger.

Also interesting is the geographical difference. I’ve never seen Steatoda grossa or S. nobilis around here — it’s all Parasteatoda (I know, different genus), with some S. triangulosa and rare S. borealis in specific habitats. McEnery makes the interesting hypothesis that it may be the venom, that Steatoda generally makes a venom that’s significantly more potent against invertebrates than the venoms of native species, allowing them to thrive and take over.

The adventure begins!

I’ll shortly be leaving Morris to drive for three hours to the airport, followed by a 5 hour flight to Syracuse, NY, and then I’ll be spending a few days listening to talks about spiders. It’s going to be simultaneously fascinating and grueling.

I have mixed feelings about conferences. On the one hand, the in-person real world experience is irreplaceable…but on the other, it’s expensive, time-consuming, and tiring. I’m thinking that what would be better for my health and sanity would be, for instance, in-person meetings one year alternating with online meetings every other year. Or maybe alternating the big meetings with local in-state meetings.

I guess I’m old and jaded.

But I’m still looking forward to this meeting, but honestly, what I most look forward to is the nocturnal spider walks. Let’s go see living spiders near a lake rather than looking at photos of spiders in an auditorium!

Our adventure is off to a poor start. Our flight from MSP to ORD has been delayed by 2.5 hours. We’re supposed to have a 2 hour layover in Chicago. I’m not sure how time and math work, but I think that means we’ll miss our connecting flight and we might get stuck in Chicago for a while. This does not make me happy.

Worsening news. Flight delayed a couple more hours. Beginning to believe it’s all a scam by United airlines.

Mission actually accomplished

We did it! We got our poster done and printed!

We’re flying off to the American Arachnology Society meeting the week of 24 June, so we even finished ahead of time. There have been meetings where I’m still slicing up copy with an X-acto knife and adding Letraset text the night before — but those were the Olden Times. Now that we can just jiggle things on a computer screen and send it to a printer, now we get it done a week and a half ahead of time.

We also got our registration and housing paid for, and booked our flight to Syracuse…and there’s the catch. The meeting is at Cornell, and we don’t quite know how to bridge that last hour of the trip. There’s no public transportation from the airport to the university! (That’s much like UMM, only we’re 3 hours away from the airport.) We’ll figure that out this week, and if nothing else, we’ll throw money at an uber.

As you might expect, the poster is liberally covered with spiders, so I’ll refrain from posting it here — you’ll have to join my Patreon to see it…or come to the meeting! You’ll see even more spiders!