The adventure begins!

I’ll shortly be leaving Morris to drive for three hours to the airport, followed by a 5 hour flight to Syracuse, NY, and then I’ll be spending a few days listening to talks about spiders. It’s going to be simultaneously fascinating and grueling.

I have mixed feelings about conferences. On the one hand, the in-person real world experience is irreplaceable…but on the other, it’s expensive, time-consuming, and tiring. I’m thinking that what would be better for my health and sanity would be, for instance, in-person meetings one year alternating with online meetings every other year. Or maybe alternating the big meetings with local in-state meetings.

I guess I’m old and jaded.

But I’m still looking forward to this meeting, but honestly, what I most look forward to is the nocturnal spider walks. Let’s go see living spiders near a lake rather than looking at photos of spiders in an auditorium!

Our adventure is off to a poor start. Our flight from MSP to ORD has been delayed by 2.5 hours. We’re supposed to have a 2 hour layover in Chicago. I’m not sure how time and math work, but I think that means we’ll miss our connecting flight and we might get stuck in Chicago for a while. This does not make me happy.

Worsening news. Flight delayed a couple more hours. Beginning to believe it’s all a scam by United airlines.

Mission actually accomplished

We did it! We got our poster done and printed!

We’re flying off to the American Arachnology Society meeting the week of 24 June, so we even finished ahead of time. There have been meetings where I’m still slicing up copy with an X-acto knife and adding Letraset text the night before — but those were the Olden Times. Now that we can just jiggle things on a computer screen and send it to a printer, now we get it done a week and a half ahead of time.

We also got our registration and housing paid for, and booked our flight to Syracuse…and there’s the catch. The meeting is at Cornell, and we don’t quite know how to bridge that last hour of the trip. There’s no public transportation from the airport to the university! (That’s much like UMM, only we’re 3 hours away from the airport.) We’ll figure that out this week, and if nothing else, we’ll throw money at an uber.

As you might expect, the poster is liberally covered with spiders, so I’ll refrain from posting it here — you’ll have to join my Patreon to see it…or come to the meeting! You’ll see even more spiders!

But I was joking!

You know this podish-sortacast that Freethoughtblogs runs? At the end of the last one, we were talking about new topics, and I casually threw out “SPIDERS” expecting everyone would actually pick something of broader general interest. The jokes on me, because guess what we’re talking about on Saturday?

I can probably think of something to say. Whether it is of interest is a different question.

Summer plans

I have turned in all my grades, and it’s beginning to sink in that there will not be a relaxing summer of relaxation. We’ve got an arachnology conference coming up at the end of June — the core data is all done, but we’ve got some details to fill in and lots of pretty photos to take, and we have an ongoing project in putting together a staging series. We’re also going to make some field trips throughout the summer to get out of the lab and see some sunshine and more exotic spiders. I’m also reviving my course in developmental ecology next spring, so I’ve got to do all the prep work for that this summer.

I just want to take a nap.

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.