They’ve got fabulous spiders, I’m told. I missed them when I visited, next time I’ll be sure to bring a large collecting vial.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
They’ve got fabulous spiders, I’m told. I missed them when I visited, next time I’ll be sure to bring a large collecting vial.
For once, the YouTube algorithm is working in my favor. It’s currently saying “Oh, so you like big spiders, do you?” every time I check in, which is factually true, so I keep seeing spectacular Argiope behaviors.
This one tickled me because I have vivid memories of seeing my first Cicada Killer, the Most Terrifying Wasp in the World, as a child. It was perched on a tree branch in my back yard, and it was swiftly and brutally dismembering a cicada, the Most Obnoxiously Noisy Insect in the World, and it was mesmerizing. It would just tear into it sloppily with its mandibles, slurping down slimy crunchy bits, and scraps of chiting and fragments of body parts were raining down out of the tree. I swore I’d never go near one of those monsters.
Yet here’s Argiope, my hero, neatly turning a Cicada Killer into lunch.
The camera work isn’t great, but you can see how effective Argiope‘s web spinning is — she isn’t tying up her prey with single threads, but with these broad ribbons of silk. I’ve seen them immobilize a large grasshopper in seconds.
Here’s another video of Argiope making an egg sac. The difference is that this is a time-lapse, so you can see the whole process in 10 minutes rather than 10 hours.
I particularly like how she squeezes out a big ball of eggs, looking like a mass of tapioca.
It’s OK if you skip around. This video of Argiope aurantia making an egg sac is over 8 hours long.
It’s very cool, though. It’s an impressive feat of spider engineering, and the mama spider invests a lot of effort into building that sac and filling it with many hundreds of eggs. My spiders build quicker, simpler sacs, and though I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to catch them in the act — it also doesn’t help that they seem to construct them in the middle of the night.
It also makes me anxious. I’m quarantined — hopefully for only a few days — so I can’t go into the lab to feed the colony, and they’re probably getting hungry. It’s nothing to panic over yet, since spiders are adapted for sporadic prey capture, but if I get bad news on my COVID test, I’m going to have to do something. My idea is to make one visit to the lab at some late hour and bring all the spiders to my house for prolonged care. It’s a lovely home decor idea as well, don’t you think?
I’d much prefer to get positive news in the next day or two so I can get back in the lab without cluttering up my house with more spiders, though.
One of the winners of the 2020 IgNobels was this study of attitudes in entomology.
Richard Vetter won an Ig Nobel for his paper looking at why people who spend their lives studying insects are creeped out by spiders.
His paper, “Arachnophobic Entomologists: Why Two Legs Make all the Difference,” appeared in the the journal American Entomologist in 2013.
Vetter, a retired research associate and spider specialist who worked in the entomology department at the University of California Riverside for 32 years, found during the course of his work that many insect lovers hate spiders.
“It always struck me as funny that when I talked to entomologists about spiders, they would say something along the lines of, ‘Oh, I hate spiders!’” he said in a telephone interview.
He found that many bug lovers had had a negative experience with a spider, including bites and nightmares. The fact that spiders are often hairy, fast, silent and have all those creepy eyes freaks out entomologists, he said.
Except…the entomologists I know are appreciative of spiders. Unless they’ve been lying to me, I don’t know that this is really a problem.
Besides, once you get to know spiders, everyone loves them.
We took a walk last night, and found a place in some cinder block where, suspended in a framework of silk, there were these little collections of grass and twigs glued together. I pulled out this one, which is nicely boat-shaped, and inside were two egg sacs and a shy momma spider. I carried it home in my hand, which was a little tricky — as momma became somewhat alarmed that her house was moving, she would peek out and sometimes scurry around on my hand. Fortunately, I think she was also concerned about her eggs, so she didn’t go far.
This is probably a mistake — I’ve got way too many spiders as it is — but I’ll take her into the lab today and feed her and care for her and raise her little babies as if they were my own.
Hey, here’s a game! I picked this photo because the spider isn’t at all obvious in her nest. Can you find the spider?
As usual, you can find closeups on Instagram and Patreon.
I have an office spider, Diana, who lives in a display case with a wooden climbing frame and a floor made of left over calcareous sand and shells from my aquarist days. Today I found that she’d seized stuff from the ground, like this:
…lifted them up to her web up high, and build a hemispherical nest, which she was snuggled down inside of. Clever girl.
If you want to see the nest, I put a photo on Patreon (reminder: I have a patreon account I use to try to pay off our legal debt) and also on Instagram.
I went off to feed the spiders this morning, and as I was going out the door, Mary asked if I needed any more egg sacs. “I hope not,” I replied, because I’ve got so many baby spiders to tend that I’m not sure what I would do if I had another round of hatchlings. So she cursed me. I found 7 nice new Parasteatoda egg sacs, and 2 new Steatoda triangulosa sacs. I tell you, I’m getting so good at breeding spiders I am currently oscillating between two states.
The only thing that will save me is that I expect, from past experience, that about half the egg sacs will contain only infertile eggs. It’s not my fault, the females are picky, and some of them constantly friendzone* all their suitors. Three of them are definitely from non-virginal, proven breeders, though, so I’m anticipating dealing with about 300 more babies soon.
By the way, I like to regularly remind you all that I have a Patreon, and if you want to see a photo of a hungry baby at the table, sign up!
*“friendzone”, in the native Spider, is synonymous with “murder and eat”. I suspect MRAs/Incels of being native Spider speakers, which has led to all kinds of confusion and erroneous ideas about the human version of the word.
Just so you know, this is a terrible week (has there ever been a good one?). I’m doing this big deal faculty seminar at my university tomorrow, which has my anxiety jacked to 100, and I’m giving an exam on Friday, increasing student anxiety, and I have students who have been exposed to COVID and are quarantined, and I haven’t been able to go out spidering as much as I would enjoy. It also didn’t help to have FtB suddenly crash out. Things are happening, though. We’re making real progress on getting the apparatus for some behavioral studies running, and even have a backlog of data piling up from nightly time-lapse runs. Here’s another one.
We’re slowly clearing away bottlenecks. We’re still uploading data as we collect it on our Raspberry Pi to a Google Drive (that was about 2 gigabytes of frames for that video), and then downloading it to our personal computers. One catch is that Mac makes me unhappy again, choking on the download. Linux makes me happy because it has absolutely no problem smoothly downloading data from Google, but then it makes me unhappy because it doesn’t have the sweet easy video tools I want. But then Mac makes me happy because it does, so I just use a flash drive to move the data to my Mac, which can instantly convert everything. So the data is flowing from Raspberry Pi → Google Drive → Linux → Mac, and then to YouTube. It’s nice to see everyone getting along, but if we had a way to bypass one step of that pathway, I’d probably take it. Especially since at some point I might want to have a couple of Raspberry Pis chugging away at observations.
Our spiders are very quiet during the day, but we noticed that every morning their cages were full of fresh cobwebs. We knew they were sneaking around at night, and we resolved to catch them at it. A student, Ade Atolani, and I put together a gadget so we could watch.
We got a Raspberry Pi with a NoIR camera, drilled a hole in a plastic cage, and mounted it above a spider. I had no idea if this would work adequately at all — would we have enough resolution to even see the spider? How effective was this camera at seeing in the dark anyway? — so we just slapped together a quick trial run. We turned everything on late one afternoon, told the Raspberry Pi to take a picture every 60 seconds, and let’s see what we get. Miraculously, it all worked, first try.
What you’ll see in the video is a rectangular wooden frame in a cage, and we’re looking down on it. There’s a nice velvety dark cloth on the bottom, to minimize glare and reflections. At the beginning, there’s diffuse light from the window, so the infrared camera isn’t kicking in yet, but when it gets dark enough, the IR lamps automatically switch on, and the purplish black cloth looks pink. The important thing is that we can see the spider all night long, as it goes through bursts of activity. Awesome.
It looks like we’re going to have to sample at a higher rate, because the behavior is very bursty. We’ll enclose the whole set up in a light-proof box to get rid of the extraneous light. I also want to try some side illumination with an IR lamp to see if we can resolve the webbing as it goes up. This was just a pilot experiment, but it’s very promising.
