Tell me about it

Old news.

Nothing gets between a fiercely protective mother spider and her children. Dripping tree resin trapped adult female spiders and baby spiderlings about 99 million years ago, forever showcasing the maternal care exhibited by these arthropods, according to new research.

One of the awkward things about raising spiders is that they don’t just have a few babies, and they don’t just dribble them out a few at a time over a long period…no, when spiders have babies they have a whole lot of them all at once. Yesterday, on top of all the teaching I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I had to feed all the spiderlings I’ve sorted out into individual vials, and then I noticed another egg sac had hatched out into a vast cloud of hungry, tiny arthropods, demanding a meal too. I’m nearly out of flies! I’m going to have to double the quantity of flies I grow just to keep up with the ravenous horde!

None of these spider pants make sense

OK, I’m trying to parse these images, but any spider limb diagram that incorporates the abdomen doesn’t work. The coxa (the proximate segment of the limb) attaches to the cephalothorax, not the abdomen, so the first two images simply do not fit. The third, maybe, but only if the pants hang so low they don’t cover the coxa, trochanter, and femur.

Maybe this diagram of the ventral cephalothorax will help.

I’m sorry if my pedantry ruins the joke, but spiders wouldn’t wear pants.

Spider before dawn

Forgive me, I include a photo of a spider down below. Maybe the fact that it is rather blurry will soften it a bit — I took it before sunrise when everything was a bit dim, and I just did a casual handheld shot. What impressed me, though, was the web, which is about 60cm across. Last night, this Argiope‘s web was a tattered broken mess, with big holes punched in every quadrant (the spider had a busy day catching bumblebees). When I went to bed, it was a pathetic few radial strands with a still intact stabilimentum, and the spider calmly poised in the center, mistress of a ruin.

I was up this morning before sunrise, and thought I’d take a quick look at the wreckage. Mirabile dictu, the orb web was restored, pristine and perfect! She apparently had a busy night.

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That’s what I call gardening!

We have a small nature garden in our backyard — lots of local plants and flowers, all growing wild and untended, and it’s full of flowers…and bees. Step out there, and it’s just buzzing nonstop. This was all Mary’s idea, and she did all the planting.

It was missing something, though. Yesterday we went out to a local grassy field and collected some new specimens. Warning: you can guess, given my participation, what the new residents are.

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How many spiders is too many spiders?

My heart says you can’t have too many spiders, but my brain says, “Whoa there, that’s a lot of spiders to sort out and feed.” Then my brain has second thoughts and realizes many of the babies will die, so we better get extras, and then agrees with my heart. So many spiders to to separate into vials…and more to come.

Uh-oh

I collected all these egg sacs yesterday, and this morning I find that two of them are already hatching out.

I know what I’m doing this morning!

I broke up the first batch of babies, and collected a nice round 100 spiderlings (That’s 100 octal, which is the natural base for spiders to use, which is 64 for you ten-fingered creatures). Only two escaped! So there are a couple of little baby spiders toddling around somewhere in my lab, I hope they find enough to eat.

The morning harvest

Never,ever dust or clean, that’s my motto. We looked over our neglected sun room and garage, and look what we found:

That’s a Parasteatoda egg sac, which probably contains between 20 and 100 spider embryos.

But that’s not all. We collected seven egg sacs and 4 fertile mamma spiders, all from two rooms in my house, and now sitting in vials while I anxiously await the Hatchening. Which will probably occur next week.

I’m kind of dreading this — it’s like everything happens all at once, and then I’ve got a gigantic swarm to maintain. I better set up some more fly bottles today, they’re born hungry.