Oh, look. I just posted my 500th observation to iNaturalist. If you’re very, very nice, I’ll let you see it.
Hint: it’s a spider.
I don’t usually jump up on my chair to cheer and applaud for a cartoon, but today I make an exception.
But whoa, this one needs to die. There was a time when Jonathan Pruitt’s work on spider behavior was exactly my cup of tea, and there was so much of it — so many papers, so many coauthors, it was a rich vein of information. And now it’s all gone swirling down the drain.
Almost 2 years after a Twitter storm erupted over data problems, including the possibility of fabrication, in more than a dozen scientific papers co-authored by behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt, the saga may be nearing a climax. A spokesperson for Pruitt’s current employer, McMaster University, told ScienceInsider on 12 November that the school’s “investigation has now concluded and Pruitt has been placed on a paid administrative leave until the process is complete.”
McMaster’s actions last week include denying Pruitt access to students and research funds. Also, last week researchers learned that the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), withdrew Pruitt’s dissertation from its library system, although it remains unclear whether his Ph.D. has been revoked. Both institutions made their moves quietly, and some of Pruitt’s former colleagues have expressed frustration at the lack of transparency in McMaster’s long-running probe into Pruitt.
Twelve of the ecologist’s papers have been retracted so far and expressions of concern have been posted for 10 others, according to the Retraction Watch database. Nicholas DiRienzo, a data scientist now working in private industry, has been trying to retract several more papers he co-authored with Pruitt. But he says he has been stymied because journals want to wait for McMaster’s findings. “This is a correct and necessary step and one that should have been done much earlier,” DiRienzo says about placing Pruitt on leave. “Letting it take so long when there was a clear signal there was a problem has arguably harmed [his] students.”
Pruitt keeps lingering on. He needs to do everyone a favor and just give up — there is no way his scientific career can be rescued. The integrity of the data has to be paramount, and violating that trust is the kiss of death. Would I ever trust a paper with his name on it? No. I’m not going to be alone in that, either.
I don’t know where he can move on to from this disaster. He’s in Florida; maybe one of those cheap roadside attractions? Or maybe a pest control company could hire him. Anything but science.
Aww, this is such a sweet story. An anonymous Australian donor gave up a beautiful pet in order to save lives.
The arachnid has been named Megaspider, and the park says she is roughly twice the size of a typical funnel web spider, more comparable to a tarantula.
The 8cm funnel web spider’s 2cm fangs will be milked for venom that can be turned into antivenom.
The Australian Reptile Park on the New South Wales Central Coast is the only funnel web spider venom milking facility in the country and the antivenom produced there saves up to 300 lives a year, the park says.
Australian Reptile Park’s education officer, Michael Tate, has “never seen a funnel web spider this big”.
“She is unusually large and if we can get the public to hand in more spiders like her, it will only result in more lives being saved due to the huge amount of venom they can produce,” he said.
Call me selfish, but if I found a spider like that I’d be tempted to keep her and coddle her and hug her — OK, maybe no hugging — and keep her forever.
I know all of you want to see this gorgeous beast, so I’ll include a photo below the fold.
We’ve had several frosty mornings and even a brief snow flurry, so spiders have been dying off all over the place. I watched this video because I thought it would be more morbid, but it’s actually pretty cheery, with lots of short clips of beautiful spiders. It’s also very basic, but hey, I need to see more spiders!
One quibble: the narrator disses grass spider webs, saying they’re “not fancy”. I sense a bias favoring orb webs! Grass spiders build these slick platforms for prey to land on, with the sheet funneling back to an elegant cozy tunnel where they lurk. They’re very nice.
I could also make a case for cobwebs, which look chaotic but are actually 3-dimensional structures, unlike those planar 2-D orb webs.
Uh-oh, curmudgeon alert. Everyone has been sending me this article, “Spiders are much smarter than you think”. It’s a good article. It’s just that a few things about it set me on edge.
Smarter than I think? You don’t know what I think. I already have a high opinion of spider intelligence. But OK, they’re doing good work to spread the news about the abilities of spiders. You should read it if you don’t already know about it.
I’m also bothered by the word “smarter”. We can’t quantify intelligence! Not in people, not in spiders, not in anything. We can isolate bits and pieces of aspects of intelligence, and measure some of it, but “intelligence” in the broad sense is multifactorial and hard to pin down. What the article actually describes is behavioral adaptability and the capacity to model their environment. Spiders can do that! By studying them, we can discover interesting things about how they do that.
Another concern is that the article is almost entirely about a single species, Portia.
No fair! Jumping spiders are a kind of charismatic microfauna, cute and pretty. They are active predators, too, which tends to bias our impressions of their human-like behaviors. We are self-selecting for what we quantify as “smart”, which is often a word meaning “human-like”. A lot of spiders, though, are ambush predators who have a different suite of behaviors. Are they less smart? A black widow that left its web to chase prey on foot would be less “smart”, but we might judge it as more in alignment with our expectations.
I do very much agree with these sentiments, though.
“There is this general idea that probably spiders are too small, that you need some kind of a critical mass of brain tissue to be able to perform complex behaviors,” says arachnologist and evolutionary biologist Dimitar Dimitrov of the University Museum of Bergen in Norway. “But I think spiders are one case where this general idea is challenged. Some small things are actually capable of doing very complex stuff.”
Behaviors that can be described as “cognitive,” as opposed to automatic responses, could be fairly common among spiders, says Dimitrov, coauthor of a study on spider diversity published in the 2021 Annual Review of Entomology. From orb weavers that adjust the way they build their webs based on the type of prey they are catching to ghost spiders that can learn to associate a reward with the smell of vanilla, there’s more going on in spider brains than they commonly get credit for.
“It’s not so much the size of the brain that matters, but what the animal can do with what it’s got,” says arachnologist Fiona Cross of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Yes! So let’s avoid judging animals whether they are smarter or dumber.
It’s really just an excuse to talk about spiders for an hour.
Today was spider feeding day, and it’s usually a bit of a chore just because I have so many spiderlings right now. Mary came along to help this time, though, and it was amazing how easy it was: I’d zip along all the vials with spiders, flicking sacrificial flies to their waiting doom, and she’d follow along behind, capping each vial as I went. Zoom, it was done.
Now my dilemma: do I keep my wife, dragging her in to assist every feeding session, or do I grow an extra pair of hands? The latter does have some attractive aspects, you know.
But it’s almost Hallowe’en, so I get to revel in spiders for a while.
Below the fold is a photo of what looks like a gigantic spider filling a room, surrounded by a swarm of its babies.
The good news for you arachnophobes is that it’s a trick of perspective — it’s actually photographed in a smaller enclosed space.
The bad news is that the space was under the photographer’s bed.
The badder news is that it is a Brazilian wandering spider, one of the most venomous spiders known.
Also, the photo was posted on The Weather Channel’s page. You never know what you might see when you go to check the weather for a picnic.
Sweet dreams!
