Ball o’ spiders

Isn’t technology wonderful?

That reminds me, I have many balls of spiders to tend to this morning.

Run/fly away, little fellas, I have cruel plans in mind

Started a big project today — we have a fate in mind for all these spiders my lab is churning out. It will be an interesting fate for me, but alas, not at all healthy for the spiders. I’ll be keeping my Patreon followers informed, the rest of you will have to wait until the Fall.

I’m going to be redoubling my spider farming efforts for a while. I literally had baby spiders nesting in my beard this morning, and I just now had one crawl out of my shirt cuff. It’s a good thing I like the little fellas. Which makes it sad that this kind of a meatgrinder project. I’m going to be the Cruella DeVille of spiders.

Cobweb art

I have realized that the way I raise spiders, in a plastic container with a 2-dimensional wooden frame assembled from coffee stirrers and hot glue, means that the spiders build cobwebs constrained to only 2 dimensions. Now I’m thinking it would be easier to study the rules they use to make these networks. Hmm…another student project?

This photo was shot with my iPhone. I think I could get something better with my Canon R and a lens opened wide, to f/1.4 or thereabouts, and a dark background set way back and out of focus. I may have to do some photography experiments.

The end of a stressalicious semester

Today is officially the last day of instruction, but there won’t be much instruction going on — it’s all administrative stuff for me, acquainting students with the record of their past performance, pointing at the specter of the imminent final exam like a ghost of Christmases yet to be, polishing up that final exam and posting it for them to procrastinate and worry over, the usual bad time at the end of a difficult school year.

Next year will be better, right?

It could be worse. Look at these spider photoreceptors!

It turns out that if spiders aren’t properly fed, their photoreceptors start to die off.

Researchers looked at the bold jumping spider (Phidippus audax), a common species that relies very much on light-sensitive photoreceptors in its large eyes to spot prey. When the spiders don’t get enough nutrients, these photoreceptors can be lost.

“Photoreceptors are energetically costly,” says biologist Elke Buschbeck from the University of Cincinnati. “It’s hard to keep up with their energy needs.”

“If you deprive them of nutrition, the system fails. It’s the functional equivalent of the macula in our eyes.”

See, if I don’t have enough research time to take care of my spider colony, they might go blind. I’ll run that by the administration and see if I can get a reduction in teaching load.*

*Note: it will not work.

Araneus gemmoides left us a present last year

For the last few years, we’ve been graced with regular summertime visits by cat-faced spiders, Araneus gemmoides. They’re great big orbweavers, usually no trouble at all, although last year one of them took over our deck, stringing webs over the doors. We let her. When you’re that beautiful, you can get away with anything.

One of the reasons they’re no trouble is that they just lurk, and then when winter arrives, they die. Last year’s visitor crept up above our back door and left an egg sac in a dark corner. Here it is!

We got a step ladder to get closer, and I poked a lens right in there. The sac was partially torn open on one side (predation?), so I got a good view of the eggs inside.

Those are definitely spider eggs, but they aren’t very far along in development. It’s been chilly and snowy for the last few weeks, so it’s not surprising that they haven’t matured much. Maybe Minnesota will be kind and bring us a real spring soon?

I’ll keep you informed about this developing subject!

Mighty Morphin’ Spiders

Last month, I thought I’d found a color morph in S. triangulosa: some recently caught wild spiders from Wisconsin that were almost solid black, with just a hint of the standard pattern. I figured I’d be able to do some crosses this summer and see if it was heritable.

Now I don’t need to! Look at the difference a month in the lab environment makes.

[I try not to splash spiders in your face here. You’ll have to look it up on Instagram or Patreon.]

That’s the same spider, almost a month apart. Now it looks all the other spiders I’ve got. I suspect it’s got to be something about the change in diet, from whatever they were finding in a garage to a steady diet of fruit flies and mealworms.

They were caught in Wisconsin, where they’d been living on cheese curds, brats, and La Croix, probably.

Also note that this spider has made a couple of egg sacs. The one in the top right is a half-assed mess, only a few eggs only partially wrapped in a thin skein of silk.

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.