We have a pet bold jumper in a terrarium in our kitchen, and it’s true — they are pleasant little animals, highly interactive, and not at all threatening.
Our bold jumper might be flattered by this video, except for the bit where he talks about the spider’s tiny little brain. I disagree, they’re very smart!
After all, we can study spider evolution too, and it’s a notably branchy tree, especially compared to those loser primates who are in decline.
That last number, 62 spiders in 10-30 species living in our homes, is probably a very conservative estimate. That’s close to what I’ve seen in my cold northern home, and I know I’ve grossly undercounted everything.
You cannot possibly disagree.
It was a busy morning, good thing I got in early today.
If I keep this up, I do believe I’ll be able to start doing some genetics in the spring, optimistically.
New baby picture at the Patreon.
…is in my office, of course. They must know I won’t squish, and I might even throw them a spare fly.
This week is a mess: I gave an exam, I need to get it all graded. I have two students doing senior seminars, with rehearsals tomorrow and the day after. We have two — count ’em, TWO — faculty meetings this week. And then there’s the usual course load.
So of course this is the day another Steatoda triangulosa egg sac has to start spewing spiderlings. It doesn’t look like much right now, that blurry dark blob is the egg sac itself, and I count a whole six newly emerged spiders, but more will be coming in the next day or two. Just these few are a handful, as soon as I popped the lid they were rushing to balloon off into the sunset. We have an experiment in mind for this batch, so we’ll be setting that up real soon.
Oh, right, this also meant that this morning I was frantically scrubbing the dishes I’ve been neglecting in the sink, because we’ll need a lot more containers.
It doesn’t look like much, but tomorrow that will be a seething box of baby spiders.
They’re a little guy, capable of absurd acrobatic stunts to take out a bigger opponent. It’s Euryopis umbilicata!
“It has this crazy way of hurtling itself at an ant, doing this fabulous cartwheel then, like Spider-Man, attaching a piece of silk in mid-air to the ant,” said the study’s senior author, Prof Mariella Herberstein of Macquarie University.
“Then it keeps on twirling away from the ant while the ant is being captured. At that stage [the prey’s] fate is sealed.”
I’ll have to see it to believe it.
Yep. That’s Drunken Spider style.
I’ll have to show the video to my spider colony. They have a rather sedate and unspectacular style of just charging forward and stabbing their prey with a venomous fang, no flash or style.
I did some preliminary testing of a cheap endoscopy camera, looking at the thriving inhabitants of my compost bin. It’s a quick, rough test, and I need to work on being steady with the camera, but it’s got potential.
Where should I put this camera next?
It’s unfortunate they’re so hard to hear, but did you know that spiders can make sounds?
Instead of catching flies in a web, the wolf spider hunts and runs down its prey, including small bugs and even other spiders. They have excellent night vision and because they make a hiss-like sound, they are among the so-called hissing spiders.
“Hissing is kind of a misnomer,” Dill said. “What they do is actually called strigulation, like crickets do when they rub their legs together.”
In the case of a wolf spider, it makes sound by rubbing its front legs together.
“Those front legs have hairs that are best compared with Velcro with little hooks on the end,” Dill said. “Some people say it sounds like a hiss when they hear it.”
The behavior is partly a defense strategy and, for the male spiders, mating behavior. In fact, they will turn up the volume during mating season by rubbing their legs while sitting in a pile of dry leaves, according to Dill.
“The rustling of the leaves helps them make more noise,” Dill said.
I don’t think my quiet little Theridiidae make any noise — they’re homebodies, they’re interested in vibrations but not at any detectable auditory level — but now I’m tempted to get some teeny tiny sensitive microphones to check them out.
Also…here is the required “creature of the night” video.
Well, today is another overloaded day, with a lab this morning, and then I volunteered to take a group of students on a spider tour of campus (we’ll walk around and do some observations), and then I have a division meeting this evening. But somewhere in there I’ve got to set up some Beefcake Fruit Flies for an experiment I describe on Patreon. Yeah, it turns out you can bulk up flies with dietary supplements. It’s true. I’m going to see if musclebound flies are better for spiders.
If it works, look for my profitable line of Spider Food Supplements on sale online.
I suppose I could ask if beefcake flies make beefcake spiders, and feeding beefcake spiders to birds makes beefcake birds, which could in turn be consumed by people…but that’s getting too renfield. It’s always a danger that one can be tempted to go down the renfield path.
