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.
I only got 13 live babies out of that one hatching, which is sad and pathetic. I’m clearly going to have to go on an Egg Sac Hunt this weekend to get more.
I describe this feeble output on Patreon, with photos of the unproductive wreck of an egg sac. I’ve also put a picture of one of the healthy offspring on Instagram. And, oh yeah, on Discord. Why aren’t you on our Discord server? It’s free!
It’s the last day of the American Arachnology Society meeting. Have you ever experienced this? You’re simultaneously looking forward to many of the talks, but you’re also really looking forward to ending the deluge of information and getting back to normal? Yeah, brain overload is terrible. But at least with a virtual conference I don’t have to pack up and get on a plane and drive for half a day, and I won’t lose a few more days to con crud.
Also, now this morning I have to find time to sort babies into vials. That’s my agenda: glue eyes to microscope and delicately shoo baby spiders into new containers, then rush back to glue my eyes to a computer screen to attend to a couple of hours of webs and venom (the subjects of the first two blocks of talks today.)
