Proper decorum when spotting a spider during an arachnology meeting

There’s a major added benefit to attending a virtual conference. I’ll be spending the next 5 days ‘attending’ the American Arachnological Society meeting, which really means sitting in my home office listening to voices over my headphones with images of data about spiders on my computer screen, and the advantage is that I can be distracted without disrupting the event. Last night I was tuned into Maydianne Andrade’s excellent talk about widows and sex variation, and this critter was scampering over the windowsill.

[Sorry, you know the drill: the photo is on Instagram or Patreon]

So I got up, grabbed a collecting vial, scooped it up, and snapped a couple of photos right in the middle of her talk. There were about 180 arachnologists listening to it online; imagine if they each spotted a spider during a meeting, and felt no restraint about indulging their passion right then and there. Chaos! The entire audience would be on their hands & knees, or climbing the walls!

It would be great!

Maybe not as productive information-wise, though.

Also, there was a tiny theridiid spinning a web on my microphone stand. I got it, too, but it’s so small I think I’ll need to bring it into the lab to look at it with the microscope.

Are you on Team Snake, or Team Spider?

I know which side I’m on — the winning side, and that would be the spiders. Here’s a whole photo essay of spiders killing snakes. It’s a real David vs. Goliath matchup, and it seems the little guy (who is often Latrodectus — I really have to get some of those in my lab) typically wins. As the article says, “there are no recorded instances of a snake successfully biting and injecting venom into a spider.”

To be fair, though, that’s probably because of the gross mismatch in size. Spider kills a snake, sits on it for days trying to suck the juices out of it; snake kills a spider, chomp, gulp, it’s done and gone in a few seconds, providing fewer opportunities for a photo op.

A triumphant moment in history

Today I was surprised to learn that there was one time — one time only — that Charlie Brown managed to kick the football, and it was thanks to Spider-Man.

This is what radioactive spider bites were intended for.

Suddenly, meetings

Nothing for a year, and suddenly I’ve got two meetings at once this week. The big one is the annual meeting of the American Arachnological Society, which begins on Thursday and continues until the following Wednesday. It’s a virtual meeting (I think registration is still open, and it’s cheap at $20) so it’ll be almost a week of nothing but spider talk on a fairly loose and casual schedule. I am so looking forward to it.

And then, on Sunday, I’m going to have to skip an online poster session because — hold on to your hats, this is unbelievable — I’ve been invited to speak to the Atheists of Florida. An atheist meeting? Do they still have those? And they invited me? Don’t they know who I am? Sheesh. A fellow works hard to destroy the whole atheist movement and a few years later they all forget.

Anyway, they probably think they’re safe, since I’ll be talking about science. Little do they know, my topic is the biology of intelligence, and one of the things I’ll be doing is taking apart atheist buzzwords, like “rationality” and “reason” and “logic” and “intelligence” by explaining how spiders, and other animals, are also logical and intelligent, and are probably better atheists than humans, since none of them have any need for that god hypothesis.

Expect schisms, rifts, and recriminations all across Florida after my poisonous spirit touches the state. It’s what I do.

A dismal day for spiders

Grey, cloudy, cool, raining. We did a little early morning spidering, checking out the Stevens County Fairgrounds, and found nearly nothing. The barns were open, but they’ve been shut up for over a year, so the spiders probably starved to death — two years ago, there were lots of fat orbweavers thriving in the shadowy corners of the cattle barn, feeding on juicy flies. But no cows last year meant no flies meant no spiders.

The pandemic has been hard on us all.

I spotted one teeny-tiny juvenile orbweaver lurking in a concrete drain pipe, out of the rain. That was it. I guess it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to be out in weather with giant water-drops bigger than your whole body splashing down, punching big holes in your home.

We did see some nice Parasteatoda and one jet-black brawny S. borealis hiding inside the windows of the 4H administration building, where we couldn’t get at them. They waved to us and asked us what the heck we were doing out in the rain. So we decided to come home and sit inside and drink hot coffee, like smart sensible spiders.

Oh what a beautiful morning!

Here’s what’s nice about being an early bird: it’s cool still, it’s quiet, the spiders built their webs overnight and are ready to show them off, and that morning light low on the horizon is absolutely perfect for visualizing webs. Also, the spiders are having their breakfast so you can see lots of predatory action.

Not here, though: I put photos of spiders on iNaturalist and Instagram, and also on Patreon, although it costs a dollar a month to see them there.

If you’ve got the earworm, you can listen to the rest of the song on YouTube. The corn isn’t quite as high as an elephant’s eye though, yet.

Yeah, yeah, Australians are always bragging about their spiders

I know — everyone is sending me this story about the vast billowing waves of spider silk in Australia. It’s always Australia, they get all the attention because of the magnitude of the spider webs, but really, it’s fairly common behavior. I’ve seen smaller scale examples right here in the good ol’ USA.

For example, last weekend I was poking around my brother Jim’s yard down near Ocean Shores, Washington, and I opened up a small shed, and behold: the entire ceiling was one vast fluffy blanket of cobweb, dotted with little spiders everywhere. It was beautiful. It looked a lot like those Australian seas of spider silk, only smaller and less transient.

I took a picture of one of the multitude of inhabitants. I think it’s probably some species of Theridion.

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