I had to go to the hardware store this morning to get a little craft saw, and as he was ringing up my purchase, the clerk cheerfully asked, “What are you working on?” In my newfound spirit of sharing my scientific interests with the community, I said:
“I’m cutting bamboo strips to make artisanal cages for the spiders in my lab!”, with a smile.
Ftzzt. Short circuit. No comment. Silently handed me my receipt. I left.
Maybe it was the smile. I’m not very good at the smiling thing.
It’s a handsome Aussie fella, and they named it Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Johnson should be flattered. I’ll tuck it below the fold and when you’re ready to achieve full consciousness, read on.
There hasn’t been much fertility in this lab, and I don’t know what’s going on. The spiders are getting weird and lazy. Here’s Yara (last seen here), who has been building thick clumpy cobwebs and also assembling debris into a nest — she’s partly obscured by a wood shaving here. The strange thing is above her, and to the left.
Those are unhappy looking eggs enclosed in a thin web, not an egg sac. I can say with some confidence that they’re not going to develop.
This is awkward and annoying. Next week I’m going to sterilize cages with alcohol and set up new frames and repopulate, hoping this problem will go away. Maybe they’re stressed? Maybe they’re just old and lapsing into decrepitude?
I was just admiring this S. triangulosa that I found in the science building — an escapee returning to home? — and had to take a few photos. She’s very striking, with this high contrast black & white coloration.
I’ll tuck it below the fold for the arachnophobes.
I politely informed this little grass spider that I was not interested in a ménage à trois.
This is a beautiful video about the arachnids of Uruguay — great videography and information, and some spectacular closeups of spiders in action. They do seem to spend a lot of time murdering insects and sucking them down, and the sex scenes, especially in the sexually dimorphic species, can be graphic and moderately distressing — tiny males scurrying up to the abdomens of huge females, it’s like trying have sex with a wall topped with fangs that can descend when you’re done and kill you.
It’s all still pretty, and now I want to visit South America. I’ve been to Ecuador, but that was before I discovered the wonders of spiders. I should go again, except…damn this legal weight on my shoulders.
Before I left for the Twin Cities this weekend, I’d fed the spider colony fat juicy waxworms, and they fell upon them furiously. Today I checked on them, and boy were there a lot of bloated, indolent spiders lounging about in their webs, reluctant to even move. One surprise…I took a peek at Yara, who I’ve photographed before, and the change was striking, not just in her size, but in her pigment patterns.
Look how dark she is! This isn’t just the lighting, either — I tinkered a fair bit to get good illumination. Compare it to the previous photo, where she’s much lighter in color, and I would have said she was one of the more lightly pigmented members of the colony. Now I’m wondering how rapidly they can change color and what prompts it, especially since I’ve been following pigment development in the babies.
I was also looking at cobwebs today. There might be some potential for student projects here.
Mary has been away the last few weeks, helping Skatje and Kyle handle a ravening, demanding 15-month old, Iliana. She finally got back home last night, and she brought me a present! It was a spider. No one is surprised.
Well, I was, a little bit. Spiders show so much variation — I’m pretty sure this is Steatoda triangulosa, as it’s obviously a theridiidid, and it’s got that pretty pair of zig-zag stripes down the abdomen, but it’s so golden, and it’s got more zigs than I usually see in S. triangulosa here in Minnesota, and the patterns break up in a messy and different way. Species are so goddamned complicated. Why did I ever leave my nice, inbred, isolated zebrafish?
Anyway, she was guarding a nest in my daughter’s garage, and Mary brought back 6 egg sacs, all of the fluffy type we see with S. triangulosa. Most, probably all, are hatched out, but I’ll find out when I take them into the lab later.
I need this:
It’s spidercloth, a single piece of silky fabric made from silk drawn from a million spiders. It might be a little bit labor intensive.
To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.
So I can’t pick up a spidercloth cloak at Target?
We’re going to have to figure out the chemistry, and we also have to figure out the machinery in spinnerets.
Of course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk isn’t very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk or companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical scaffold or an alternative to Kevlar armor. Several groups have tried inserting spider genes into bacteria (or even cows and goats) to produce silk, but so far, the attempts have been only moderately successful.
Part of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk.
Well? Get right on that!
