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.
Peter Parker Spider-Man helps Charlie Brown so Charlie kicks the football for the only time ever in the comic strip. By Charles Shulz, John Romita and Burkey. pic.twitter.com/8L24R5JZkg
— Aaron D'Errico (@AaronDErrico) June 17, 2021
This is what radioactive spider bites were intended for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some among you doubted. Commenters thought it unlikely that a small spider could capture, kill, and consume a big ol’ cockroach. For you unbelievers, here is a video of a small spider, Steatoda (just like the ones I work with) capturing, killing, and consuming a fully grown cockroach.
Doubt no more! Those little spiders have persevered thanks to the virtues of venom and silk. And cleverness.
The science building at UMM is full of spiders! I didn’t do it, though, these belong to species I do not keep in the lab, so they’re not escapees.
A few days ago, I posted a video about Steatoda borealis. The specimens I used were all fairly light-colored, with lots of tan and orange. Here’s one my wife caught in the stairwell. [Read more…]
One of my goals for the summer is to get some hot and heavy breeding going on in the lab.
Or how about an online dating service?
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.
