We’re getting ready for Halloween.
I’ve got more spiders coming soon!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
We’re getting ready for Halloween.
I’ve got more spiders coming soon!
OK, I’m trying to parse these images, but any spider limb diagram that incorporates the abdomen doesn’t work. The coxa (the proximate segment of the limb) attaches to the cephalothorax, not the abdomen, so the first two images simply do not fit. The third, maybe, but only if the pants hang so low they don’t cover the coxa, trochanter, and femur.
Maybe this diagram of the ventral cephalothorax will help.
I’m sorry if my pedantry ruins the joke, but spiders wouldn’t wear pants.
In my ongoing efforts to find something positive to express every week, I try again to talk while doing simple lab chores.
This hits home. I have 3 egg sacs I’ve got my eye on here at home, just waiting for the first spiderlings to emerge so I can rush over to my lab.
I’ve also got a huge collection of already-emerged babies I have to feed this afternoon.
Forgive me, I include a photo of a spider down below. Maybe the fact that it is rather blurry will soften it a bit — I took it before sunrise when everything was a bit dim, and I just did a casual handheld shot. What impressed me, though, was the web, which is about 60cm across. Last night, this Argiope‘s web was a tattered broken mess, with big holes punched in every quadrant (the spider had a busy day catching bumblebees). When I went to bed, it was a pathetic few radial strands with a still intact stabilimentum, and the spider calmly poised in the center, mistress of a ruin.
I was up this morning before sunrise, and thought I’d take a quick look at the wreckage. Mirabile dictu, the orb web was restored, pristine and perfect! She apparently had a busy night.
We have a small nature garden in our backyard — lots of local plants and flowers, all growing wild and untended, and it’s full of flowers…and bees. Step out there, and it’s just buzzing nonstop. This was all Mary’s idea, and she did all the planting.
It was missing something, though. Yesterday we went out to a local grassy field and collected some new specimens. Warning: you can guess, given my participation, what the new residents are.
My heart says you can’t have too many spiders, but my brain says, “Whoa there, that’s a lot of spiders to sort out and feed.” Then my brain has second thoughts and realizes many of the babies will die, so we better get extras, and then agrees with my heart. So many spiders to to separate into vials…and more to come.
I collected all these egg sacs yesterday, and this morning I find that two of them are already hatching out.
I know what I’m doing this morning!
I broke up the first batch of babies, and collected a nice round 100 spiderlings (That’s 100 octal, which is the natural base for spiders to use, which is 64 for you ten-fingered creatures). Only two escaped! So there are a couple of little baby spiders toddling around somewhere in my lab, I hope they find enough to eat.
Never,ever dust or clean, that’s my motto. We looked over our neglected sun room and garage, and look what we found:
That’s a Parasteatoda egg sac, which probably contains between 20 and 100 spider embryos.
But that’s not all. We collected seven egg sacs and 4 fertile mamma spiders, all from two rooms in my house, and now sitting in vials while I anxiously await the Hatchening. Which will probably occur next week.
I’m kind of dreading this — it’s like everything happens all at once, and then I’ve got a gigantic swarm to maintain. I better set up some more fly bottles today, they’re born hungry.
This is a sweet story. Fiona Grayson saw a big funnel web spider taking up residence on her porch, and decided to make the spider welcome by decorating her place. So she made a tiny welcome mat, and put out little vases of flowers, and talked to the spider, who she named Cordelia.
“It was simply fun and wholesome, and in the process, I became very fond of her and excited to see her when she’d reveal herself at night,” Grayson said. “I tell her she’s beautiful and loved and thank her for her diligent pest control work. Any less would be just kinda rude and unneighborly.”
For the record, I like spiders, but I don’t quite go this far in appreciating them — I suspect the spider just sees the clutter as convenient anchor points for silk.
It’s still a nice idea.
