The spidering resumes!

We explored the local horticulture garden for spiders and found a few — a lovely young Dolomedes and a rather grumpy looking Philodromus. I try to avoid posting spider photos here, so you’ll have to check out my Patreon or Instagram to see them. Sorry. In recompense, here’s a fly:

I have to ask…so many people are arachnophobic and reflexively avert their eyes at spiders, but do you have the same reaction to close-ups of flies? You know, flies are likely responsible for far more disease and death than spiders, and don’t get me started on their Dipteran cousins, the mosquitoes.

Also, I looked at my Instagram, and it’s just jam-packed with exciting spider photos. Then I looked at the Instagram pages of my more popular, attractive, and charming friends, like David Gorski and Rebecca Watson, and what do I see? Puppies. Lots of puppies.

Am I doing something wrong?

Jumping spiders are peeping toms!

I was first introduced to the wonders of spiders in 1980, when I took a course in sensory physiology from Mike Land, who, if you know his work, is a world-class expert in eyes and vision and optics and comparative physiology. We mainly worked on jumping spiders in that lab because you could just walk outside in the Oregon spring and catch lots of them on the walls of the science buildings.

One of the cool things we learned is that jumping spiders have unusual eye anatomy. Their eyes aren’t spherical, they’re tube-shaped, and they actually function like a Galilean telescope. That’s right, jumping spiders are looking at you through a telescope — they can see things far away relatively clearly. These spiders can look up and see the stars.

We did various experiments on spider vision back then, but one thing we lacked was a spider with a transparent carapace, so we did everything with indirect behavioral and optical methods. This little video would have blown our minds.

We dissected a few spiders and could clearly see the tube-like structure, but that didn’t communicate the dynamic activity of those little telescope eyes at all.

The anatomy is all wrong!

I am offended.

OK, you’ve grafted a vaguely arthropod-like head onto a human body, but you should at least look at a spider before drawing one. The mouthparts are a nonsensical gemisch. And those claws! Come on, lazybones. Try.

I’m not going to get into what breasts do for a spider-girl. Ectopic silk glands?

Sooooon

A reader sent in this video of a grass spider laying eggs and building an egg sac. Spiders can be very maternal, although they seem to lose interest once all the babies emerge, and these are ubiquitous grass spiders. My lawn is finally free of snow thanks to a warm spell last week, and I’ve been checking it out every morning for the first grass spiders to put up their tents and cover the grass with their habitations.

If I have any complaint about grass spiders, it’s that maybe they’re too prolific. Over the course of the summer, they’ll expand their empire from the grassy bits down low to the sides of my house, usually by the avenue of expanding up the sides of the water spouts, and by August they’re displacing my favorites, Parasteatoda. But right now, I hope they’re getting busy and filling the place with mosquito-and-gnat eating predators.

Living the dream

Temperatures have been in the positive degrees centigrade for much of this week, and we’ve started seeing a few spiders outdoors. It’s time for them to start emerging and filling the world with their terrible beauty. Making me king is entirely optional.

Shut up about Joro Spiders, already

OK, enough with the spider freakout. I’ve been rolling my eyes so hard for the last few weeks that my ocular muscles are sprained. I’m talking about headlines like this:

Don’t journalists have a few other things they should be concerned about right now? This isn’t one of them. This is a great big nothingburger, unless you’re concerned about invasive species and the fate of their naturalized cousin spider, Trichonephila clavipes, which has been here in the southeast US for over a century, is about the same size as Trichonephila clavata (the Joro spider), and is just as harmless.

Oh, you’re not? Then shut the fuck up.

These are big spiders, but T. clavata is harmless. They’ll eat big bugs, but have no interest in you and can’t even bite through your skin. They’re also about the same size as Argiope, which we have in huge numbers up here in Minnesota, but T. clavata is only slightly more cold resistant than T. clavipes and has the potential to slightly extend their range. I only regret that I probably won’t find any way up here in the North.

But so what? Here’s where T. clavipes lives now (in blue), and where T. clavata has been found (in red). Don’t panic. They’re big, but they’re beautiful, and they’ll eat lots of grasshoppers and stinkbugs. Welcome them!

Read this for the True Facts.

Just so you know: last summer, we transplanted several Argiope from the edge of town to our natural garden in our backyard. They did well! I was a little concerned that we wouldn’t have enough food for them — I usually find them in open fields that are swarming with grasshoppers — but the female and male pair were thriving all through August, before they disappeared, as Argiope usually does when the weather cools. We’re hoping they managed to produce an egg sac or two to overwinter, which, with a little luck, will lead to clouds of little baby spiders ballooning over the neighborhood, and a repopulation of our garden. This is nothing to be feared! They’re gorgeous animals.

It’s unlikely that they’ll populate most of the yards in our neighborhood, unfortunately. Lawns are bad. They don’t produce enough big insect biomass to feed these animals.