This is an unusual story: in WWII, the US government needed the finest, strongest strands of silk for bombsights, so they turned to the Spider Lady, Nan Songer. She was commissioned to extract the silk from spiders and pass it on.

Songer began experimenting with black widows (genus Latrodectus), which produce a silk dragline composed of six strands to stabilize themselves in midair and control their landings. By separating this thread into individual strands with a needle, she achieved the width that the military needed. “The strands were virtually invisible to the naked eye,” Sahara Quinn, a historian and vice president of the Yucaipa Historical Society, tells The Scientist. Yet they carried illumination better than silk from other species, helping the crosshairs stand out against a background.

Through her experiments, Songer also devised a novel technique for extracting silk in greater quantities. She carefully pinned living spiders belly up and then used a hairlike yucca strip to stroke their abdomens until they produced strands, which she collected with a small hook. Using this “silking” technique, Songer was able to harvest reams of silk that she wrapped around frames for transport. The US government quickly became her biggest client; its couriers traveled to Yucaipa with empty briefcases handcuffed to their wrists to prevent theft.

I am impressed. I’ve extracted long silk lines from spiders unintentionally — that part is easy — but then separating them into single strands? I didn’t even know there were 6 strands in a line of silk!

Unfortunately, the process has been replaced with synthetic fibers. Too bad. Retiring to a spider croft where I spend my last days spinning artisan silk was sounding attractive.

Also, the Nazis are all gone now, right?

The feeding regimen for my spiders is fruit flies every other day, and once they get above about 2.5 millimeters long, a mealworm once a week. Flies are easy. They die, they get sucked dry, the empty husks of their bodies lie around until I clean up the containers. Mealworms…not so nice. They’re much bigger than the spiders, but they’re still doomed, and in short order they’re trussed up, filled with venom and enzymes, and their guts liquify and are mostly consumed.
That “mostly” is doing a lot of work there. The worms are much bigger than the spiders, remember, so they get turned into a bug milkshake which has about ten times the volume of the predator. They can’t eat the whole thing.
So it rots. It rots spectacularly, since it’s predigested soup. I usually let the spiders sup on the corpse for two days, but then I pull out the blackened, shriveled worm and throw it out.
The spider containers are usually odorless, or nearly so, but these dead mealworms produce an unholy reek. Gooey dead bugs produce a whole new level of unimaginable putrid. Worst part of the job.
Today I was a renfield, tasked with purging the cages of their decaying victims.
While I was at it, I also measured how well they’re growing. A couple are over 5mm long now. One shrunk, I’m not sure why — they are developing into a male, they didn’t eat their mealworm, so maybe they’re in an adolescent funk. I’ll keep an eye on him.

In related news, while I’ve been consistently using the same microscope magnification (16x), that’s not going to work anymore. Some of them barely fit in the field of view, so I’m going to have to switch it down to 10x from now on. Look at this rolypoly monster (sorry, exclusively Pharyngula readers, it’s on Patreon.) You can also see how well the triangulate pigment pattern has developed.
I’m thinking I’ll continue measuring the growth of this batch of spiders for about a week more, ending at 60 days. Then I’m moving them to the grown-ups cages. The plan would be to relocate the females first, and then after a few days to establish a nice homey web, move in the horny males and see if I can get some courtship going…and then maybe the females can start investing some of the energy they currently use to grow to humongous size in producing eggs.

First thing this morning, I checked on my new first wave of Steatoda triangulosa spiderlings, took photos, measured dimensions, etc., and posted some stuff to my Patreon page. Usually those posts are private to patrons, but this one time I open it up to the public. If you like pictures of cute baby spiders, check it out. If you want more, subscribe! This is going to be a daily thing as I document the development of pigment patterns in Steatoda triangulosa. It’ll be fun! Your daily dose of spiderlings!

Time for my weekly spider measuring event. The young’uns molted again, and once again, they’ve grown some more.

It’s a fairly steady pattern, as I might have expected. They eat, they get bigger. There’s a fair amount of variability there, and I’ll post a couple of photos of the spider on Patreon to illustrate that.

I’ve got another egg sac close to hatching, but as usual, Steatoda triangulosa is taking its sweet time. The data so far is a rough outline with data taken at weekly intervals — it’s clear that I need to do more frequent sampling to get a better picture of how pigment patterns develop, but these guys are not in any hurry to get under my microscope. It won’t hurt, I promise!