“Ma’am, is that your husband in the sack of kitchen scraps and half-digested body parts?”

Not a happy morning — that Steatoda borealis I paired up earlier is no longer a pair. I guess she got a hungry.

Well, this is a bother. That was my last adult male — I’ve got about two dozen juvenies growing up in the incubator — and this has been a chronic problem. Every winter, all the spiders start eating less, lose all interest in sex, and stop laying eggs, despite my efforts at fooling them with temperature and a July-like light schedule. Last summer I’d come in an find fresh egg sacs every day; this winter, they dry up and even start dying.
I guess this just means I really have to do the bulk of my research in the summer…or maybe I’ll have to spend the winter trying to figure out how wild spiders survive the cold.

These are two Steatoda borealis, happily coupling: male is on the left, female on the right.

If you’re confused about what’s going on, it helps to know that spiders are acrobatic, they don’t care much about up or down. Also, every time I catch S. borealis in the act, they mate face-to-face, with the male sliding his long palps equipped with multiple hooks underneath her jaws to lock onto her abdominal genital opening. Now you can tell what’s going on, right?

I know it’s Saturday, barely. I’m on break. Time is beginning to lose all meaning, except for the fact that I’m aware that classes start up again in ten more days — I’ve got a doomsday clock ticking down to my doom in front of me. I have recieved a note from the administration informing me that they want my syllabuses submitted now, which is a bit daunting, since one class doesn’t have one (it’s all independent study and writing), another is a totally stock course we’ve team-taught for years (mainly, it’s going to be a ton of grading for me), and the final course is a big one that is still coagulating in my head.

That one is going to scramble my brains and confuse all the students. It’s an eco-devo course and I’m going to make it radically interactive, with the students doing a lot of the work within a loose structure I provide. What students look for in a syllabus is “how many exams?” and “when are the exams?” and “is there a term paper?”, and I’m seriously considering answering those with “there are no exams” and “exams don’t exist at any time in this classroom” and “you’ll be too busy reading all the papers I throw at you to write”, and making the grade entirely dependent on participation. Show me that you can engage with the subject and ask good questions, and that’s how you’ll get an A.

Is this too weird? Am I being too creative for a stodgy old STEM class? Will I get in trouble if I write this down in a syllabus and let an administrator read it? In my defense, Socrates didn’t give midterms, so I’m simply returning to a conservative style of teaching. (Socrates was also poisoned by his critics, I know.)

Anyway, that’s been my source of anxiety lately, looming deadlines and course design. You don’t want to hear about that, you want spiders, and spiders I will deliver.

I got a link to this video on our discord server. I’m not too keen on the particularly morbid YouTube channel — it’s by a guy who travels around visiting the locations where celebrities died, a kind of post-mortem paparazzi, but in this case he’s visiting an abandoned mansion and swimming pool in Hollywood. He succeeds in making it creepy, of course, because he has to talk about all the starlets who were tricked into appearing topless by the icky owner of the place. But the one redeeming feature is the cool, semi-legendary spider painting that’s still there, and apparently appeared in a lot of old cheesecake photos from the 40s and 50s.

OK, bear with me, this next one is really, really gross. It features Laura Ingraham. Also she looks thoroughly disgusted throughout. It’s about immigrants, in particular, those immigrants “who almost always come from Asia.”

It’s about Joro spiders. Joro spiders are awesome.

One more, and fortunately, there’s absolutely nothing horrible about this one: no yucky ghouls, just one particularly glorious spider. This is a video lots of people have been sending me, about the largest funnel web spider found in Australia. It does dwell a bit too much on how dangerous it is, but that’s what we always get from the popular press.

I’ll just say if anyone wants to send me funnel web eggs or a Joro egg sac, I’d be thrilled and would raise them to cuddly adulthood.

Do not send me more Laura Ingraham, or Laura Ingraham videos. She’s revolting.

That they’re black, and they hang out in dark corners in dark places.

That’s Lolth, my Northern Black Widow (Latrodectus variolus). She grew very rapidly and is now blimped up to a gigantic size. She (definitely a she at this point) desperately needs to get laid because, well, look at her.

I’ll probably go shopping for a male in the spring.

We’re raising Steatoda borealis in the house, and one couple has produced two egg sacs recently. The male and female coexist just fine, and here you can see the male has the job of guarding his progeny.

This is part of Mary’s collection of spider friends, and she was a little worried about what to do when these hatch out. No problem — I’ll take over then.

I guess enough people complained about the stupidity of their article about spider eggs in some dork’s toe. They’ve posted retraction.

An expert has disputed Mr Blake’s claim that a spider could have laid its eggs in a human foot.

Dr Sara Goodacre from the University of Nottingham said: “I can’t possibly see how it could be true at all because I know about their biology.

“[The egg sacs] take quite a while to spin. The spider venom is not necrotising, it is designed to paralyse a fruit fly.”

She said that when a wolf spider lays it eggs, they are kept in a substance that looks like a ball of cotton, which some species carry on their backs.

Dr Goodacre said there had been no reports suggesting the eggs could live in a “pus-infected wound”.

She added: “There is no European wolf spider that could really penetrate the skin.”

The British Arachnological Society also called it “implausible”.

So far, they haven’t apologized for their lax fact checking or the patent stupidity of their article.

This is a story that is egregiously bogus. Wolf spider lays eggs in man’s toe during cruise.

No. Just no. Libel. I only had to read the headline to know that it is bullshit.

Colin Blake was celebrating his 35th wedding anniversary in France when his toe turned purple overnight.

Growing concerned, Mr Blake visited the ship’s doctor and found that a Peruvian wolf spider had bitten him and laid eggs in his toe.

After being given antibiotics to combat the toxins, a “foreign body” was cut out of his toe and he is set to make a full recovery.

Wolf spiders are well-known for laying eggs in a sac — a sac that they then carry around, tending until the spiderlings emerge. They do not lay eggs with a bite, which is anatomically impossible.

What this tells me is that the “doctors” on cruise ships are grossly incompetent. There was no “egg” in that man’s toe.

The next day his toe had become swollen and turned purple, prompting a trip to the ship’s doctor.

The medical staff cut his toe open with a scalpel and a milk-like pus came out.

The pus looked like it contained tea leaves, which turned out to be spider eggs.

What the fuck? That’s not what spider eggs look like. I suspect malpractice.

Back in the UK, Mr Blake was treated at hospital and was given a course of antibiotics to reduce the swelling.

Once the swelling subsided, the spider’s fang marks could be seen as well as the toxin making his way through his foot.

No, they couldn’t. How do you see a toxin?

Four weeks after the bite, Mr Blake discovered a “foreign body” in his foot.

Mr Blake said: “One of the spider eggs hadn’t been flushed and must have hatched.

“They believe the spider was making its way out – eating its way out of my toe.”

The antibiotics had killed the young spider and doctors then removed it by cutting open Mr Blake’s toe.

AAAARGH. No. Spider eggs can’t survive imbedded in human flesh, and they’re not going to eat their way out.

This is outrageously bad “journalism,” without even the most basic fact-checking, or even cursory questioning of the plausibility of the account.

Also, they illustrate the article with a photo of a Brazilian wandering spider, the least of their offenses.

Lately, I’ve been curious about this one species of spiders I’ve been breeding, Steatoda borealis. What makes them stand out compared to the other two species in the lab is the size of their palps — they’re significantly larger in S. borealis. It’s got me wondering why they have these massive spiky hooked medieval maces on their faces, where other species have prominent, distinctive bulbs but nothing of the magnitude of this one set of males.

Then I see this species of harvestmen that put my spiders to shame. Look at this gigantic apparatus on the animal’s head! It can be up to 50% of their body weight!

The surprised don’t end there. These harvestmen have three distinct kinds of males, alpha, beta, and gamma, all distinguishable by the morphology of their genitals, and then there are females, of course (only one flavor, though). So four sexes?

So how did this state of affairs come about? Fighting. The males engage in combat to gain access to females. This is a familiar strategy — you’ve got the big bruisers who go straight into battle with their rivals, and while they’re thus engaged, you’ve got the gracile sneaker males who dart in and have sex. Those big genitals are costly and tactics that don’t require that kind of investment are advantageous. We’ve seen similar phenomena in beetles and squid.

Alpha and beta males can have a body mass up to seven times higher than that of gamma males, demonstrating the drastic intraspecific variation found in this species. Gamma males adopt a scrambling strategy, searching through their environment to find mates and avoiding contests with other males, while alpha and beta males use their exaggerated chelicerae as weapons in contests to access females.

Awesome. Now I’m thinking that maybe S. borealis exhibits a pattern of combat that has driven the evolution of more exaggerated genitals. It’s not the only possibility, though — the females of this species are also fairly large and powerfully built. So who’s fighting whom?

I may have an excuse to set up some cage matches in the lab.