School portrait day

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.

[Read more…]

Frustrating morning in the lab

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.

It’s mortality assessment day!

My large collection of baby spiders is much smaller now. This morning, I went through the whole collection, scrutinizing them carefully for health, and tallied up the end result of my breeding experiments. Then I gave everyone a last meal in their baby vials, because tomorrow I rip up their natal cobwebs and transfer each to new, clean, larger containers so I can raise them to full adulthood.

It was a grim morning. There’s been a steady die-off of spiders over the last two months, often occurring at molting — they sometimes seem to get stuck, and that’s the end of that. I had three separate lines of spiderlings: 1) The R (for Runestone) line collected from a female at Runestone park, well off the beaten track; 2) The H (for Horticulure) line collected at an outdoor building at the local Horticulture garden; and 3) The M (for Myers) line collected right here in my garage at home. There was considerable variation in mortality.

R line: 95% (!) ☠

H line: 75% ☠

M line: 50% ☠

Maybe I’m just terrible at spider husbandry. I don’t have a good feel for how much normal juvenile death I ought to expect. It’s possibly interesting that the line collected from an indoor spider thrived best in the lab, while the ones found in a rather ‘wilder’ environment did worst.

Today wasn’t great, but the survivors all look fat and handsome and healthy, and tomorrow they get moved to their new roomier abodes, and I’ll also take photos of them. I’ll probably flood my Instagram account with pictures of my pretty young spider children, so watch out for that.

Time to make my getaway

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.

Spiders, like me, are just hard to love

This article on spider researcher Maydianne Andrade struck a nerve.

Spiders are not exactly a charismatic animal in many people’s minds. Do you feel like you have a different experience than someone who works on tigers or cute birds like chickadees?

I have to spend quite a lot of time convincing people that studying spiders is actually important. They are one of the dominant invertebrate terrestrial predators, which means that they take down a lot of insects. And so understanding how they work in their environment is actually important for us, understanding how to maintain the health of those environments.

If you look at the distribution of the diversity of organisms in nature, insects and spiders make up a huge proportion of that diversity. And yet they make up only a tiny proportion of what type of work we’re publishing on, and so it really is the animals with the big eyelashes and the big eyes, you know, the cute mammals and the beautiful sounding birds that the people are studying disproportionately.

Oh yeah, and those bird scientists are just the worst.

She’s commenting on the fact that I added two whole minutes of bird footage shot from my office window to my last video because it’s really hard to find wild spiders in a Minnesota December. Just for that I’m going to have to record some of my lab spiders for the end of my next video, even though I know it’ll trigger squeals of protest, and my subscriber count will probably go down.

You know, some spiders do have big eyes and eyelashes, he says, defensively.

[Read more…]

The sound of spiders feeding

The campus is dead quiet right now. The parking lot is empty. Offices are all closed. When you walk in, if you’re attentive, you might hear the constant faint hum of the air conditioning system in the science building, but your brain will tune that out after a short while.

The noisiest part of the feeding are the flies. You dump them from their bottle into a plastic cup; it sounds like rain as they tumble in. Then they scurry about frantically with a chitinous rustle, a distant shshshshsh from the cup. You turn to the vials of spiders and uncap them all. There is no sound, no movement. The dead stillness makes you look in and wonder, “are you still alive in there?” You see the motionless plump bodies. They’re in no hurry. Spiders possess infinite patience. It’s in their nature. Rather than wondering if they’re OK, maybe you should be questioning your own lack.

You tap the cup of flies to knock them all down, and open the lid. You flick a few flies into each vial, 1, 2, 3, move to the next. The loudest noise in the process is when a fly drops to the bottom of the vial, tik, tik. Except that when they fall directly into a web, they’re silent…tik, , tik. For a while, you swish flies into all the spider vials, tik, ,tik, tik, , , tik, ,tik, tik, tik.

The sound of spiders feeding is silence. They raise their forelimbs like a pair of daggers, they slip quietly on silk threads to their prey, turn, and knit a prison with their hindlimbs. No noise at all. Flies trying to escape the trap are louder than the spider assassins, and they’re barely a whisper as they scrabble at plastic walls.

I had a pleasant morning in the lab today, if you couldn’t tell.

Behold! Light box Mk II!

Last week, Ade & I “built” (I use the word loosely) a space cocoon out of aluminum foil to control the illumination of our experimental spiders. It worked, clumsily, and it looked hideous.


Today, we took a Great Leap Forward and advanced the cause of Spider Containment and Illumination technology by building Light Box Mk II. It is beautiful and elegant.

We constructed it with frame of Space Age™ PVC pipe, covered with sheets of Cutting Edge™ Black FoamCore, the edges sealed with Advanced Technology™ adhesive backed metallic fabric…in other words, cardboard and duct tape. It looks damned fine, though. We’ve got a spider in a cage beneath a NoIR camera in there, and Ade is caught in the act of activating our time-lapse software on the Raspberry Pi so we can quantify it’s behavior night and day. Our sole obstacle to doing Great Science is now the spider: our Mk I may have been clumsy, but it did work, and unfortunately this particular spider cowered out of sight* almost the whole time the computer eye in the sky was staring down at her. We’re doing another trial run now.

Another bonus is that we made the box fairly roomy, and we could eventually put 3 or 4 spiders in separate cages in there. We only have the one camera right now, though, so that will have to wait.

*Of course, a spider refusing to behave is still data in a behavioral observation, so that was fine.