Tower of Spiders

We’re currently isolating all freshly laid egg sacs and tagging them with the date so that we know exactly how old the embryos are. This week I started scanning all the adult containers and setting aside those who had produced an egg sac.

It started out well: one on Sunday, one on Tuesday, one on Thursday, and I’m thinking this is perfect — a fresh batch of 30+ embryos every other day is what we can handle easily. Then then this morning, Friday, I come in and…5 new egg sacs for 21 April.

Then I realize…Thursday is quarter taps night at the Met Lounge downtown. Have they been sneaking out for a wild party night, and then coming back to the lab all primed for reproduction? That’s the only rational explanation.

I could be concerned that I’m going to be in another situation where the lab is drowning in more spiders than we know what to do with, but we’re about to switch paradigms a little bit. Next week we start plunking lots of embryos into fixative, then the week after we start doing embryo dissections and staining with propidium iodide. None of these spiders are going to live to adulthood. Sorry.

What beast emerges from the dark depths?

This is exciting. I’ve written about my compost bin before, which has been a rich source of spider lore — a partially closed habitat, the domain of some large dark spiders that build their cobwebs in a place rife with buzzing insects.
The bin has been inaccessible for months, buried under snow. Today the snow had retreated enough that we could hobble over slick, crunchy ice to get to it and throw back the lid. What did I see?
First, fresh silk, new cobwebs laid across the corners. Somebody had been working hard. Then, suddenly, at one side, a massive spider loomed out of the darkness — a fully grown, adult male Steatoda borealis. His presence tells me something: he’s much too large to be a recent hatchling, so he must have overwintered down in the dark, sheltered from the storms, huddled in the fermenting warmth of the compost.
We closed the lid and let him be. I’m sure there are more down there who will creep out in the next few weeks to rebuild a thriving colony.

If you want to see this massive unit of a tough Minnesota spider, you can go to Patreon or Instagram. He’s big and dark in shades of red and black with thick strong limbs and glowing eyes.

Signpost of Spring!

For me, the first sign of spring is when I’m walking around and start seeing thin filaments everywhere — the little threads of silk left behind by traveling spiders. This year the first delicate threads spotted were on campus, draped over the metal signposts around the parking lots. They’re all webbed with criss-crossing strands!

I didn’t see the spiders there, not yet, just these traces. From past experience, those signs are often populated by Theridion, so I’ll keep my open for the first appearance of the little guys.

Teaching outside my comfort zone

Today is a busy, frightful day. I volunteered to stop by the Morris Area High School to give away some spiders and talk in general about the importance of spiders, and I don’t exactly know what I’m doing. College students are one thing, but middle school and high school kids are completely different beasts. I’ve done this before, and mainly what I come away with is the feeling that we don’t pay teachers enough.

I’m meeting with 7th and 10th grade biology classes this morning and afternoon. I’m bringing in a lot of baby spiderlings which are tiny and hard to see, not impressive at all, and a couple of larger adults. I’ve also got several egg sacs, one of which is very, very close to eclosion — maybe we’ll get a sudden eruption of spiderlings, which would be exciting. I’m going to propose leaving a half dozen spiderlings in the classrooms, along with a supply of wingless fruit flies, and recommend that they take care of them for a few weeks, and then on some bright spring day, to release them in a grassy area near the school.

I’ve been researching lesson plans lately, and unfortunately, almost all of them have been geared for younger kids — K-6. I’m not going to talk down to this group, so I figure I’ll just explain a few scientific details and open the floor to questions.

They’re going to eat me alive, aren’t they?

The Renfield protocol

They don’t tell you about the dirty jobs involved in spider care. Last week, I fed all the adults nice big juicy mealworms, which they promptly killed and then spent several days sucking on their vital fluids. Even when they’re very thorough in their consumption, though, they still leave behind a sack of chitin with organic leftovers inside.

Then it rots.

It rots thoroughly, turning black and soft and turning hairy with fungus. It has a sulfurous reek to it, as well. Then the spiders turn to me and peremptorily demand, “Renfield! Oh, Renfield! Do clean up the rotting corpses, will you? That’s a good Renfield.”

Renfield is me, if you haven’t figured that out. This morning I got to go through all the cages and pluck out decaying mealworms with a pair of forceps. This is my job. That, and regularly bringing them fresh bodies to turn into rotting corpses.

Oh well. I also got to play with my shiny new camera and take photos of my masters.

You’ll have to go to Instagram or Patreon if you want to see photos. (Hmm, I didn’t do a very good job of promoting those links with all this talk of decaying corpses, did I…)

Too many spiders?

I admit, I might have a small problem. I came in to work this morning and found another egg sac had spewed out a bunch of adorable baby spiderlings. (This is a very low resolution shot, I hope the arachnophobes here can bear it.)

This is nothing new or surprising. I’ve had four egg sacs bear fruit since last week, so I’m getting used to it. I sit down and sort out all the spiderlings into separate vials, and tuck them away near the incubators. Not in the incubators — they’re all full of spiders already. They seem to do fine at room temperature.

Well, I think the future of the colony is more than assured at this point. If I raise 150 spiderlings to adulthood, I’d have to take over the neighboring lab spaces and maybe occupy the science building atrium, and I have about 15 more egg sacs waiting in various containers already. I’m going to have to draw a terrible, wicked line.

Future babies will not be coddled and given living quarters and free food. Instead, we have some experiments in microscopy and staining in mind, and they will be killed, quickly and humanely, thrown into fixative, and their bodies treated with various exotic chemical compounds before being mounted on a confocal microscope.

Oh jeez, I sound like a Republican.

FREEEEEDOOOOMMM! For a few days, anyway

Today is my last day of classes before Spring break, and it’s going to be a busy one. After I finish up lab today, I’m free! Except for grading an exam and lab reports, and having to tend the students’ flies until they get back, and feeding my own monstrous swarm of arachnids every day. Other than that, I get to sit back and take it easy.

So let’s do a live stream tomorrow! I’ve got some rage bottled up in me about idiots denying evolution and climate change, plus maybe I’ll reveal some spider breeding tricks. Live! On air!

I do have to get through the rest of this day, though.

Cobwebs as art

Spider webs, especially cobwebs, are so complex that it can get annoying. They’re also hard to photograph — so many thin threads going every which-way in 3 dimensions, it’s easy to get lost. I’ve been gratified lately to find that I can confine spiders to make mostly two-dimensional sheets using a wooden frame in a plastic container (they prefer natural substrates), but I have no illusion that this reflects the sophistication of their natural behavior. It’s mainly a good way to get them to pose nicely for me, and to simplify moving them from one place to another.

But some people manage to capture those 3-D webs.

“Forget about spider man and his meek two-dimensional webs! Even though spider webs have been around for at least 140 million years, we have never managed to preserve, measure and display their webs in a three dimensional form. Tomás Saraceno has opened our eyes to the intricate geometry of spider webs with his newly invented scanning instrument that digitized for the first time a three-dimensional web. In fact, there is no single museum in the world with a collection of this kind. His spider web sculptures are a breakthrough in both science and art, and thanks to his methods and technique he has enabled much needed comparative studies in mathematics, engineering and arachnology, opening new fields of studies.”

(Peter Jäger, Head of Arachnology, Senckenberg Research Institute, Frankfurt am Main, and co-author of the World Spider Catalog, 2015)

There are lots of pretty pictures at that link. Everybody loves orb webs, but cobwebs are much more intricate and confusing.