Shoes allow me to better serve my ravenous masters

I am pleased to report that for the first time in almost a month I am wearing shoes and socks, and have stuffed the ugly ol’ immobilizing boot in a closet. It feels like real progress at last. Next, I’m going to gingerly walk over to the lab and set up some class stuff and tend to my little beasties.

I know that this is the least exciting news you’ve ever heard — some guy is wearing shoes and socks! NY Times, get a reporter on that! — so here’s something that’s almost as newsworthy: false widow spiders kill and eat mammals larger than themselves.

The video shows a noble false widow’s web, located outside a bedroom window of the house in Chichester, with a small mammal ensnared in the silk. Later analysis of the mammal’s remains helped researchers identify it as a pygmy shrew.

The shrew was still alive in the web, the researchers report, although it was only seen making a few slight movements near the beginning of its ordeal. That’s probably due to the spider’s powerful neurotoxic venom, which is known to cause rapid neuromuscular paralysis.

The spider was seen moving back and forth between the shrew and the rafters above the window, using silk to hoist the shrew upward about 25 centimeters, the researchers report.

After 20 minutes, the spider had lifted its prey into the rafters, partially out of view. It wrapped the shrew in silk, fed on it for three days, and then dropped what was left out of its web.

According to the researchers, “the remains of the shrew were nothing but fur, bones, and skin”.

Now you know why, despite my recent travails, I still made the effort to guarantee the few hundred false widows in my lab a twice-weekly feeding. I don’t feed them rodents, but they do love big juicy mealworms that are at least fifty times their mass. They got fed yesterday, and today Igor…I mean, me…must extract the drained corpses. Next feeding on Tuesday.

Perfect sheet webs

We’re having a little unpleasant weather — high temperatures and sky-high humidity, to the point where this morning we were socked in with a gray mist. The good thing about that, though, is that it highlights all the grass spider webs in our lawn. These are perfect and beautiful.

Yes, we have a few weeds in our lawn. It’s a yard for diverse invertebrates, so that’s OK.

Leaves? The leaves have started to fall? It’s that time, I guess.

New acquisitions

I’m home from the exotic pet fair. I acquired a Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens! And a Northern Black Widow! They’re young juveniles, now I just have to fatten them up.

Photos will follow once I have them set up.

Update: I don’t think they were lesbian spiders

I’m sorry to disappoint, but looking at my Steatoda borealis population, I think what I’ve got are dimorphic males: some with huge spiky palps, some with slender pencil-shaped palps. I have no idea if these are distinct subtypes, or just developmental differences.

I have the full story on Patreon, and posted some photos on Instagram.

Lesbian spiders would have been cool, though, unlikely as that was.

Lesbian spiders? Dimorphic males? Precocious adolescents?

Yesterday, I set up a cage for Steatoda borealis. I haven’t successfully raised them in the lab, probably because I haven’t fine-tuned their environment, but I thought I’d give it another try. I caught these individuals living in a communal environment (my compost bin), so I made a substrate of moss, for burrowing in, and added 5 females, all in the same confined space.

I came in today, and what do I find? They’ve built a communal web and they’re all perched on it, spaced about 2cm apart. This is already interesting.

Something to know about S. borealis: the adult males are distinctive, they have palps that look like massive medieval instruments of war, while the females have slender palps. I was pretty confident I’d segregated them by sex accurately, on the basis of casual inspection.

So I added a male this morning. All the spiders seemed somewhat agitated, there was much scurrying and tapping and exploratory sensory behavior, as I would expect. The male was courting the biggest, plumpest female in the cage.
Then, to my immense surprise, two of the females (I think) paired off, and one of them was aggressively thrusting its skinny little palps at the others genitals. Whoa, what? Did I misgender them, or was this some kind of social behavior?
Then I get dragged away to attend some fucking meeting, and couldn’t inspect them more carefully. This was extremely annoying, as you might guess.

Now I’m intensely curious. I’ve searched the literature, there is no mention of male dimorphism in this species, but it’s an interesting possibility that warrants further investigation. The other possibility is female:female sexual behavior — these spiders are somewhat social compared to others I’m working with, so it could be some kind of bonding behavior? Another possibility is that I’m fooled by juvenile males that exhibit typical sexual behavior but just haven’t completed their final molt to acquire their gloriously developed sexual organs.

I’ll be putting them under the microscope tomorrow to find out.

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.