While I’ve been laid up in pain, I’ve been coming up with spider projects I can do while sitting down. Here’s one: raising Steatoda borealis, which would also open the door to a couple of other projects studying spider sociality and singing and pigment development.
Here’s a happy story: people are finding whip spiders, or amblypygids, in all kinds of unexpected places. The point is that you can find all kinds of wondrous things in nature, if you just know to look for them. Wouldn’t it be cool to open a cupboard and find one of these looking at you?
(OK, below the fold because apparently some people would react with horror.)
Here’s something you don’t see every day: an article about how we need to talk about spider conservation. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue, since spiders are basically the charismatic megafauna of the invertebrate world — where you might think of something like tigers and wolves as the mammalian superstars, spiders fill a similar role among the arthropods.
“The feeling that people have towards spiders is not unique,” says Marco Isaia, an arachnologist and associate professor at the University of Turin in Italy. “Nightmares, anxieties and fears are very frequent reactions in ‘normal’ people,” he concedes.
Perhaps that’s why spiders remain under-represented across the world’s endangered-species conservation plans. Average people don’t think much about them, relatively few scientists study them, and conservation groups and governments don’t act enough to protect them.
That’s a major gap in species-protection efforts — one that has wide repercussions. “Efforts in conservation of spiders are particularly meaningful for nature conservation,” Isaia points out. Spiders, he says, have enormous ecological value as food for birds and other animals. They’re also important to people, both as predators of pest species and as inspiration for medicines and engineering.
My first spider project, started a couple of years ago, was a survey of spider populations in people’s outbuildings — garages and sheds — that I argued would be a useful proxy for studying invertebrate populations. Counting chironomids would be way too daunting, but counting the smaller number of chironomid predators would be much easier. At least that was the plan. We spent one summer knocking on doors, getting permission to invade their storage spaces and sweep for spiders, and I have a little pile of folders and species counts that I’ve assembled into a nice baseline measure…but then this damned pandemic hit, and I haven’t been able to do the follow-up measurements. Maybe next summer I’ll be able to resume it.
It’s a lovely project for undergrads. You don’t need to know anything about spiders, other than to be able to recognize one, so day one you can collect data. I hope we can continue it in 2022, and then I’ll just have to figure out how to deal with a big gap in the series.
I was doing it as a study of the health of the invertebrate population in general, but there are a lot of things we don’t know about spiders in general.
“Spiders are understudied, underappreciated and under attack by both the climate crisis and humans affecting our environment,” says spider expert and science communicator Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri, who was not affiliated with the study. “These are one of the most diverse groups of animals that we don’t really think about on a day-to-day basis. There’s like 48,000-plus species, but my experience is that most people don’t really have a sense of how many are in their area. In the United States, for example, we have just 12 spiders on the endangered species list out of the thousands of species recorded here.”
This lack of information or protection at the national level affects international efforts. At the time the research was conducted the IUCN Red List, which includes conservation status assessments for 134,400 species around the world, covered just 301 spider species, eight of which are from Europe. That number has since increased — to all of 318 species from the order Araneae. (And perhaps tellingly, it’s worth noting that the Gibraltar funnel-web spider has not currently been assessed for the IUCN Red List.)
I found that about 10 species covered the great majority of spiders in a narrowly defined environment — but if you think about it, 10 different species in the 60 square meters of a large garage is rather impressively diverse. What are all those different spiders doing in that environment? And we’d often also find some other species in any one space that wasn’t universal. Then if we stepped outside into the garden, or walked down by the river, or looked in a barn that had been abandoned for fifty years, yet more species would show up.
I have no idea if any are endangered, because no one else in this area has been looking. More research is required!
She found a jumping spider. We had to investigate.
Of course I went spidering. Found some lovely Steatoda borealis living contentedly in peace and harmony in a crowded colony, so of course I kidnapped a few. You’ll have to sign up for Patreon or ogle them for free on my Instagram, but it’s worth it. S. borealis is a deep reddish purple, nearly black (the male is mostly black), with subtle reddish markings on the abdomen, quite nice.
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.
It’s remarkably easy, and you can see them hop and squeak in this video.
Oh, right, also, there are some cute spiders in it, but the frightened Aussies steal the show.
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.
