She was a very tiny angel. As I was making coffee, she slowly descended on a silken thread to float in front of my face. She was minuscule, little more than a dust mote, almost invisible.

She whispered an important message to me, though.

“We are all of us tiny and insignificant in an immense world. Most likely I would have descended before someone who wouldn’t even notice me. If I were noticed by a person, they most likely would destroy me. By purest chance, though, I have appeared before one of the few people who would be delighted to see me.”

“Remember your place in the universe, that you are both a victim and agent of fate, and be kind.”

Then she was nice enough to let me snap a few blurry photos before I released her back into the house. She was the first Steatoda triangulosa of the spring, you know.

On my daily spider meditation in the lab, today I found that they’d molted again. They’re bigger, and they have this rangy long-legged look to them.

Very handsome, one and all, but something is troubling me: they’re 8 months old. Keep in mind that I suspect there are baby Parasteatoda emerging right now, and by June/July they’ll be big strapping behemoths raising families of their own, so it’s clear my lab colony isn’t growing as fast as it should have — I may have been starving them for much of their childhood. I’m shoveling flies at them every day now, but for most of their life I had them on a weekly feeding schedule. Now I want to get some fresh egg sacs and do some comparative feeding protocols and see if that can determine an optimal schedule.

In other promising news, on my walk home from the lab I checked out a few familiar haunts. There’s a place where last year and the year before I’d found many shy Theridion lurking, and while I didn’t see any yet, I did find some fairly dense new cobwebs there. I also checked under the eaves of my house where, last year, Mary found a huge cat-faced spider that we observed all summer long, and where we found its body after the weather turned cold. No spider there yet, either, but some egg sacs tucked into dark corners, so maybe later. I’ll have to look in on that spot regularly.

I went for a walk today, and found lots of wolf spiders scurrying about, mostly too quickly for me to photograph them. This one paused long enough for a quick snap, at least.

If you are interested in spiders, the American Arachnology Society meeting is open for registration. The meeting is 24 June to 1 July, is only $20, and you don’t need to be a professional arachnologist with a PhD to attend (yay, my imposter syndrome is appeased!). I’m also interested in this new addition to the conference:

This year, we aim to connect attendees with artists, artisans, entrepreneurs and vendors who make arachnid-inspired pieces via a “Featured Artists” page on the conference website. For a small fee ($5-10) artists can have an image of their work and a link to their digital store or website included on this page. Are you interested in having your art/products featured at the conference?

I have no art/products, but maybe you do, and I want to see them!

It’s no fair. I have to work to maintain my spiders in the lab, fussing over their cages, feeding them every day, encouraging them to breed. Then there’s my colleague down the road who just has a compost bin he shovels food waste into, and every year it’s swarming with Steatoda borealis. No work at all. Just leaving it be, letting insects flourish in the waste, which feed the spiders, which also benefit from that year-round warmth of decomposition.

I wonder what the department chair would think if I just started dumping garbage in my lab? It looks like a great strategy for growing a colony.

Below, I’ve included a photo of a few of these spiders in their natural grim, dirty, cobwebby habitat.

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Arachnologists.

I’ve been reading some taxonomy papers, and oh boy, do they groove on genitals: close-up photos, lovingly detailed camera lucida drawings, every hair and curlicue noted. Of course, they have an excuse: genitals vary between species, so they’re taxonomically diagnostic.

So this morning, I noticed one of my spiders had molted earlier — he was still a bit pale and wobbly — and had definitely graduated from pre-adolescent bulge to big hairy spiky thingumabobs. I decided that I too could pretend to be a real arachnologist and ask him all about his genitals, or palps.

Here he is at a low power. Males always look long-legged and gangly to me, but look at those big dark balls on display at the front of his face. Those are the palps, which he loads with sperm and then uses as an intromittent organ.

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