Our cat is a shameless coward that fears any kind of vermin, so useless as a mouse catcher. The spiders who live on and around my house are much more effective and relentless in taking out invaders.
Walking around the yard this afternoon I spotted four instances of bloody murder of pests. Good work!
Finally! First egg sac of the season, along with its attentive mom, who didn’t want to be separated from it.
All of the black widows have been fed! Here’s Verðandi just as she delivered a fatal bite to a mealworm.
Once again, the background is the lid of the container, annoyingly. Black widows are not very dynamic pets, since they like to just sit in one place and wait for their prey, and they don’t do much and are mostly inactive. I guess when you’re that pretty you can afford to be so lazy.
My male black widow has found a cozy place. He’s snuggled down in a bed of moss, and he’s hard to spot if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I had to stick my camera lens way down into his hidey-hole, so even if you’re unfamiliar with Latrodectus, I suspect you’ll have no trouble finding him.
The black widows I adopted yesterday are taking their time to adjust. Here’s one of them:
Both of the females have scurried up to the highest point in their respective cages, and are roosting sullenly there, and are totally immobile this morning. I can tell they were active in the night because they’ve both constructed loose nests of silk, but are otherwise inactive today.
The male has disappeared from sight. I think he’s lurking in the moss.
You can tell how laid back these spiders are. I popped the lid off Urðr’s cage, flipped it upside down, and fussed about for several minutes trying to get a decent picture (that bright orange lid is not helping), and she didn’t so much as twitch. It was the perfect opportunity for a jailbreak, and she just quietly meditated.
I’ll be showing them off at about 1pm Central.
I was supposed to get some spiders delivered by FedEx yesterday. They did not arrive. I was charged for overnight delivery, but no delivery, and no notification of a delay from FedEx.
I’m hoping they show up this morning, and I’m not too worried about the health of the spiders. If it were January, I’d assume they were frozen and dead, but the weather has been mild. They’ll just be cranky and hungry.
Worst case, the FedEx delivery guys kicked it around and there’s a warehouse somewhere that has some new residents. Second worst case, there was a misdelivery and some neighbors received an epic surprise. No, really, if you accidentally get a package with my name on it, you should definitely call me before trying to open it.
I’ve ordered some spiders from a company in Florida, Underground Reptiles, and I eagerly await their arrival today. Little known fact: baby spiders aren’t delivered by a stork, but by FedEx.
I’m planning to do an online unboxing today, but the problem is that I don’t know exactly when they’ll arrive, making it hard to schedule…and at the same time, I want to do it as early as possible to accommodate potential European viewers, and also because I have to fire back any concerns about the shipment within two hours of its arrival. I hope there aren’t any concerns.
So I can’t schedule the event far in advance! I’ve had FedEx arrive anytime between 11am and 6pm, so whenever the package arrives I’ll quickly set up the video and go live. You’ll just have to check in here every few minutes to find out when it happens! Or monitor my live video channel. It’s going to be exciting, if you like spiders!
My yard is full of these tiny baby orbweavers, and I struggled to get photos of them — here I’m using my Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens with a Raynox DCR-250, and I’m doing this handheld. I should break down and snatch them up into a petri dish and put them on the microscope in my lab, but I’m trying not to disturb them too much.
Four of them have moved into our blue recycling container, one to each corner, and others are building webs in various corners of our orange house, so at least I get different backgrounds.
This week has been a good one for chelicerate evolution. Here’s another fossil, Douglassarachne acanthopoda, which was creeping around in the forests of Illinois in the late Carboniferous.
Douglassarachne acanthopoda n. gen. n. sp., holotype and only known specimen FMNH PE 91366; for interpretative drawings and scale, see Figure 2. (1) Part, detail of distal femur and more-distal podomeres, showing nature of curved macrospines on lateral edge of distal podomeres, bases of macrospines on dorsal surface of femur; (2) counterpart, detail of posterior opisthosoma showing bilobed structure at base of anal tubercle.
What is it? I don’t know. The authors are unsure. It’s an arachnid, but it could be in the spider lineage or the harvestman lineage, or it could be its own weird thing. It’s spiderish, anyway.
Douglassarachne acanthopoda n. gen. n. sp., reconstruction of the possible appearance of the animal in life.
