I knew it all along. What I read in the popular press about spiders seems to be a lot of spook stories — it isn’t news unless it reaffirms peoples’ fears. I’ve wondered how bad the reporting is, and now it’s been quantified: a bit less than half are sensationalist. That’s slightly better than my impression, but still awful.

Overall, the quality of the reporting was poor: 47% of all articles contained one or more errors and 43% were sensationalist. Stories with photos of spiders or alleged bites were more likely to be sensationalized, as were stories that contained errors. Whereas quotes from medical or other experts were unrelated to sensationalism, stories that contained quotes from spider experts were much LESS likely to be sensationalized.

If it bleeds, it leads — or if it has fangs, too many legs and eyes, and is venomous, it justifies a freak-out on page 3. What to do about that?

We next conducted an analysis to describe the flow of spider news stories around the world and to get at what may be driving the spread of (mis)information about spiders online. Unsurprisingly, countries with shared languages and with higher proportions of internet users were more likely to be connected in the global network. The number of medically important spider species present (i.e., those capable of harming and potentially killing humans) also increased the connectedness of individual countries within the network. Most notably, we identified sensationalism as a key factor underlying the spread of (mis)information.

This study provides insight into what drives the global flow of information about spiders in particular, but can also teach us some more general lessons. Our results make us optimistic because they suggest a way to improve reporting on spiders, and in turn, to shift the quality and spread of online information more broadly. News stories are less sensationalized when they consult appropriate experts, and reducing sensationalism can help decrease spread of misinformation. We found that even local-scale events published by regional news outlets can quickly become broadcast internationally, which means improving news quality at the local scale can have positive effects that travel through the global network.

Journalists, you know you can pick up your phone and call your local university or extension service and contact someone knowledgeable about the species you’re planning to libel, right? It’s not hard, it makes your story better, and it doesn’t compromise your integrity. It would be less lurid and melodramatic, though.

Besides, everyone knows that spiders are really cute and playful.

First thing I had to check in the lab this morning was the status of the spider couples I’d paired off yesterday, one pair seen in this video. I half expected carnage, with the grooms all bled dry and the brides bloated with spider juice.

But no! No deaths at all! All of them were resting quietly, a couple of them were even snuggled up together. It was very sweet. I still separated them all this morning, you know, just in case. After class today I’ll be moving the females into extra-large, roomy, deluxe cages, where they can produce all the egg sacs I could dream of. Don’t tell them, but I’ll need a fresh egg sac soon — I’m going to be popping out eggs and embryos, fixing them, and staining them a few at a time over the next few weeks with DAPI. Anyone got a good DAPI protocol for spiders? Or fruit flies? (This one will probably do. I also see that the embryos at the mid-blastula transition look, in some ways, like good ol’ zebrafish.)

Germ-disc formation in Parasteatoda tepidariorum. A contiguous blastoderm is present at stage 2 of embryonic development. The mid-blastula transition (MBT) is at the end of stage 2 and germ-disc formation needs the onset of zygotic gene expression. The germ-disc is formed by a condensation like mechanism. Cell membranes (red); nuclei (grey circles); perinuclear cytoplasm (black); yolk (yellow). Upper left corner: schematic representation of the cross-section of blastodermal cells (st. 2). Upper right corner: schematic representation of the cross-section of germ-disc cells (st. 4). Lower right corner: schematic representation of the cross-section of an extra-embryonic cell (st. 4). Not to scale

Meanwhile, that other egg sac I’ve had my eye on as being close to emergence is still doing nothing. The biggest difference between Parasteatoda tepidariorum and Steatoda triangulosa that I’m seeing is that P tep develops like lightning while S stri dawdles along. That may be an advantage for me since I have to interleave everything with a fairly robust teaching load.

I walked into the lab with some trepidation — I have lots of teaching stuff to do today, and I have one egg sac that is ready to pop, which would require me to spend a fair amount of time pushing baby spiders around and sorting them into vials. Fortunately, no new hatchings today, but look at this! She just won’t stop! (don’t be scared, it’s just one adult spider here, and she’s just a fuzzy blob.)

That’s one, two, three, four, five egg sacs. She made a new one! You can see the one almost about to hatch out on the left — the spiderlings have legs that are darkening up. Then, roughly in the middle, there’s one that’s getting a bit brown, and it’ll probably go in two weeks or so. Then THREE more at earlier stages of development. You can probably see mama in the back, too.

Also, look at all the spider poop on the bottom. It’s about time to do a cage cleaning.

I’ve got a reprieve today, but maybe a cloud of spiderlings to deal with tomorrow, or on Saturday.

Mama’s first generation is doing well, near as I can tell. A few of the females are getting so huge that they can barely move anymore, and now I’m worried that they might be getting egg-bound. Fish get egg-bound, where they are full of eggs, but they can’t get them out and they bloat up and can die horrible deaths. Can spiders get egg-bound? I don’t know. Maybe they’re waiting for a helpful male to fertilize them so they can start producing a third generation of egg sacs.

I might have to introduce some of the boys and girls to each other this weekend and see what happens.

This is an unusual story: in WWII, the US government needed the finest, strongest strands of silk for bombsights, so they turned to the Spider Lady, Nan Songer. She was commissioned to extract the silk from spiders and pass it on.

Songer began experimenting with black widows (genus Latrodectus), which produce a silk dragline composed of six strands to stabilize themselves in midair and control their landings. By separating this thread into individual strands with a needle, she achieved the width that the military needed. “The strands were virtually invisible to the naked eye,” Sahara Quinn, a historian and vice president of the Yucaipa Historical Society, tells The Scientist. Yet they carried illumination better than silk from other species, helping the crosshairs stand out against a background.

Through her experiments, Songer also devised a novel technique for extracting silk in greater quantities. She carefully pinned living spiders belly up and then used a hairlike yucca strip to stroke their abdomens until they produced strands, which she collected with a small hook. Using this “silking” technique, Songer was able to harvest reams of silk that she wrapped around frames for transport. The US government quickly became her biggest client; its couriers traveled to Yucaipa with empty briefcases handcuffed to their wrists to prevent theft.

I am impressed. I’ve extracted long silk lines from spiders unintentionally — that part is easy — but then separating them into single strands? I didn’t even know there were 6 strands in a line of silk!

Unfortunately, the process has been replaced with synthetic fibers. Too bad. Retiring to a spider croft where I spend my last days spinning artisan silk was sounding attractive.

Also, the Nazis are all gone now, right?

The feeding regimen for my spiders is fruit flies every other day, and once they get above about 2.5 millimeters long, a mealworm once a week. Flies are easy. They die, they get sucked dry, the empty husks of their bodies lie around until I clean up the containers. Mealworms…not so nice. They’re much bigger than the spiders, but they’re still doomed, and in short order they’re trussed up, filled with venom and enzymes, and their guts liquify and are mostly consumed.
That “mostly” is doing a lot of work there. The worms are much bigger than the spiders, remember, so they get turned into a bug milkshake which has about ten times the volume of the predator. They can’t eat the whole thing.
So it rots. It rots spectacularly, since it’s predigested soup. I usually let the spiders sup on the corpse for two days, but then I pull out the blackened, shriveled worm and throw it out.
The spider containers are usually odorless, or nearly so, but these dead mealworms produce an unholy reek. Gooey dead bugs produce a whole new level of unimaginable putrid. Worst part of the job.
Today I was a renfield, tasked with purging the cages of their decaying victims.
While I was at it, I also measured how well they’re growing. A couple are over 5mm long now. One shrunk, I’m not sure why — they are developing into a male, they didn’t eat their mealworm, so maybe they’re in an adolescent funk. I’ll keep an eye on him.

In related news, while I’ve been consistently using the same microscope magnification (16x), that’s not going to work anymore. Some of them barely fit in the field of view, so I’m going to have to switch it down to 10x from now on. Look at this rolypoly monster (sorry, exclusively Pharyngula readers, it’s on Patreon.) You can also see how well the triangulate pigment pattern has developed.
I’m thinking I’ll continue measuring the growth of this batch of spiders for about a week more, ending at 60 days. Then I’m moving them to the grown-ups cages. The plan would be to relocate the females first, and then after a few days to establish a nice homey web, move in the horny males and see if I can get some courtship going…and then maybe the females can start investing some of the energy they currently use to grow to humongous size in producing eggs.

First thing this morning, I checked on my new first wave of Steatoda triangulosa spiderlings, took photos, measured dimensions, etc., and posted some stuff to my Patreon page. Usually those posts are private to patrons, but this one time I open it up to the public. If you like pictures of cute baby spiders, check it out. If you want more, subscribe! This is going to be a daily thing as I document the development of pigment patterns in Steatoda triangulosa. It’ll be fun! Your daily dose of spiderlings!