Today was a big spider maintenance day. I’ve got three lines of spiders I’m raising — R (from a spider collected at Runestone park), H (from the local Horticulture garden), and M (from the Myers garage) which I’m trying to bring to maturity, so they’re getting lots of food and care, which I want to start inbreeding and generate 3 lines of related spiders so I can start assessing their variation…and then start cross-breeding. It’s going to take a while.

Anyway, down below the fold is one that’s definitely male and might be ready for mating after the next molt. His palps look painfully swole.

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Did you know classes start in 2½ weeks? It’s astounding; Time is fleeting; Madness takes its toll…but rather than doing the time warp, unfortunately, I spent several hours doing basic custodial work in the lab. First, a colleague and I scrubbed up the cell biology lab, shuffling computers into storage and putting away glassware, because that space will be used for a different course Spring semester. It’s tidy! And shiny!

Then I went into my lab, which is cluttered and grimy, and I need to make a few trips to a dumpster and polish up a whole lot of stuff — the sink is piled high with empty spider vials that need washing, for one thing. Today I set aside all the menial labor, though, and instead dismantled my microscope and cleaned up all the optics. That was fun! I may do it again tomorrow!

The filth wasn’t as bad as I feared, fortunately. One glass surface had accumulated a bit of dust and grime, and was fairly easy to wipe clean. I did have to take apart a few subassemblies, but thankfully, good German engineering made it easy.

I had to test it out with a few photos, but whereas the engineering was cooperative, the spiders were not. The entire interior of their condo cube was an intricate network of spider webs everywhere, so opening up the cube always tore their webs, making the kids frantic and excited, so they were mostly unwilling to sit still for their portrait.

I put a sample spider photo below the fold, and you’ll see what I mean — it’s all criss-crossed with silk, and I played a few lighting games to make it visible. Also note that the image is much, much better than the last spider photo I posted here.

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This morning I resolved to figure out what was going on with my muddy images from microscope. The first step was a general cleaning, and I discovered a real horror. Here’s the trinoc head for my Wild M3C:

See that tube on the right, for the camera? I looked down it. GAAAAAA. Dust and dirt and I swear, cobwebs all over. It’s a 30 year old microscope, and we’ve had microscope technicians come through every couple of years to do general maintenance on all the teaching scopes, but that tube may not have been cleaned ever in all that time. There’s a very important mirror down at the bottom of that L-shaped widget, and I think the only way I can get at it properly is to dismantle the whole device — there are a couple of tiny metric hex bolts holding it all together, and I guess I’m going to have to take it apart and try not to break everything.

Anyway, I did push the dirt around a little with a microfiber cloth, and it’s slightly better, but I think it’s filmed over with something that is fouling the image. I took a test photo of this little guy, and it’s an improvement, but still far from perfect. The image through the eyepieces is beautifully crisp, so I’m definitely blaming the problem on that little mirror and decades of neglect.

‘Ware spider below the fold!

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The spiders had to line up for their pictures today. I had a fixed routine, like a real portrait photographer.

1. Fetch a spider condo cube from the incubator.
2. Take a low power photo of the label, so I have a record of who is who on the camera ‘roll’.
3. Carefully remove the lid to avoid startling the spider. They’ve already built elaborate cobwebs criss-crossing the chamber, so that didn’t always work. I wanted them still so I could get a focus series.
4. Shoot a bunch of pictures.
5. Spritz them with an atomizer of distilled water to gently convince them to change position. It also waters them — what was neat was watching them drink. A drop of water was roughly softball sized relative to the spider — they’d gather a droplet, bring it to their mandibles, and then you could see the droplet rapidly shrink as they slurped it down.
6. Take another set of pictures.
7. Flick a fly or two into the container as a reward.
8. Put the condo back in the incubator.

It was a fun process, but I’m a little unhappy with the quality of the images — they’re not coming out very crisp. It may require some tweaking to compensate for the microscope adapter. Everything looks great through the eyepieces, but kind of squidgy in the camera output of the trinoc.

I’ll put one example below the fold.

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All right, I accomplished something this morning: I got all the juvenile spiders moved out of their cramped dirty vials and into bigger, much cleaner condos.

Unfortunately, my plan to photograph all of them so I can start documenting early pigment patterns (eventually to log changing — maybe — pigment patterns as they grow) was foiled by a series of problems: a) my camera battery was dying, b) the battery in the LED panel I use for extra illumination was completely dead, c) my lab is a shambles right now, and d) I forgot anyway that when spiders get a change of venue, they turn frantic and scamper all about. “This is not my beautiful house,” they cry, “where is that large collection of dead flies?” So no, I could not get beautiful photos. I posted a few attempts on Instagram, but gave up and just focused on getting everyone moved.

But tomorrow! a) camera battery is charged, & I’ll bring my backup battery, b) LED panel battery is charging now, c) lab will still be a mess, but I can work around it, and d) the spiders will have settled down and be resting in their new cobweb, so I can take my photos and also, as a reward, fling a fly into their web.

The Far Side

I have a plan, a good plan, for today. I’m escaping to my lab for a good chunk of the day to do mindless, mundane stuff. It’ll be fun.

Let’s see…first on my list is to make more flies. Then I’m going to scrub out a backlog of fly bottles and get them into the autoclave. Then I have to start rotating spider cages — I have to wash a half dozen cages and do some repair of frames, move a half dozen spiders from old stinky poopy cages to the new shiny clean ones, so I can wash those cages tomorrow and shuffle around some more spiders. I’ll also do some general tidying up before feeding all the baby spiders and coming home.

So there you have it, the glamorous scientific life. At least it’s all stuff one can do during a pandemic.