This morning, I cruised down to the local bait shop and bought a bunch of waxworms. “Good luck fishing,” said the proprietor, as I was going out the door. I didn’t feel like explaining that there would be no fish involved today.

I got to the lab and delicately tweezered one pale white waxworm into the center of each cobweb, where it would squirm unhappily. It had been lifted out of its comfortable environment and was hanging suspended from a couple of cables, which it did not like at all. Picture a whale trussed up and dangling from the ceiling of a meatlocker, straining to escape the trap, while little fanged predators look on.

The spiders usually paused for a few minutes. I imagine they were briefly stunned at the immensity of the bounty that has fallen from the skies, but they didn’t wait long — they swiftly scuttled out, their hindlimbs flickering as they quickly reinforced the webbing, occasionally moving in close for a long kiss.

When I left, I looked in the incubator…rank after rank of transparent cages, like little glass abbatoirs, each with a madly writhing worm struggling desperately to escape, each with a small long-legged creature clinging to their back, biting.

Warmed my heart, it did. They looked so happy and eager (the spiders, not the worms). It reminded me of my kids on Christmas morning.

I’ve had so many people tell me about this new spider, Dolomedes briangreenei, and the news makes it sound like a surprise that it can dive under water and eat small aquatic vertebrates.

Spiders have been known to do all kinds of amazing things, and there’s nothing surprising about any of that. We have several species of Dolomedes right here in Minnesota, and they’re semi-aquatic and kill and eat tadpoles and small fish all the time. The Australian Academy of Science has announced the discovery of 51 new species of spiders just this past year! I’m relatively new to this taxonomy stuff, and one thing I know is that finding new species is routine, as is discovering that species have gone extinct.

We encountered a few indoor spiders today, so I thought I’d stage a little beauty contest.

Contestant #1: Pholcus phalangioides, found wandering the laboratories of the University of Minnesota. Hobbies: must be biology, since she was captured working in a biology lab.

Contestant #2: Sitticus fasciger, found hopping around in my house. Hobbies: jumping, obviously.

You are the judges! Who wins your approval?

I’m free of teaching duties for a few weeks, so my goal for now is to get a paper written summarizing our spider survey results. I’ve been working on figures lately, and here’s a map of our survey sites.

(I also have a boring grayscale map of the same thing, which is probably what I’ll have to use for publication.)

See? We surveyed both sides of the railroad tracks. We should have tried getting more homes in the southeast side of town, though. Not shown are some of our less careful observations of locations outside of garages and sheds, where we’d find many more Araneid spiders. That’s something for another day.

I’ve also been digging deeper into our data — we have all these locations with tallies of all the species present, which is kind of overkill, since the environments we’re looking at are all dominated by just four species, and they’re all coexisting in the same spaces. I’m getting a sense of some of the peculiarities of the distribution, though: I’ve been surprised to see how rare Steatoda triangulosa is around here — we found only one site with that species back in June — and how Steatoda borealis is uncommon as well, but they form these little localized colonies where they are the only Theridiidae present.

Now I’ve got plans for these new angles to pursue, but I have to wait for the world to thaw out and for spiders to rise up again.

I checked on my colony this morning — no news to report. However, Trillian was just being herself, hanging out all relaxed in her web, legs spread out, and so I had to snap a picture.

Spiders do have personalities. Trillian is a casual exhibitionist, happy to sprawl out in her web, while, for instance, Mary Jane is shy and timid, tending to huddle in a corner. Trillian wins on photogenicity, that’s for sure.

I am currently running into the same problem I encountered last year: male spiders are weak and fragile, and I’m running low on studs. I’ve been shuffling one eager male from cage to cage to service the females, who are all going strong, but there’s a serious lack of depth in the roster. Yesterday, I left this male (males don’t get names, sorry to say) with Rio, a young P. tepidariorum who was barely larger than he was, after two weeks of at least attempted ardor with a sequential collection of lovely ladies.

This morning…

…he was dead.

He was not cocooned and sucked dry, so I don’t suspect Rio of murdering him. He was suspended from a drag line in the very center of the cage, curled up and looking cocky, but motionless. I’m going to list “amorous exhaustion” as the cause of death on his death certificate.

I don’t usually name the males — he was previously in a tube with the label “P. tep ♂” — but in his honor, I posthumously name him Mr. Studly.

Another day in the lab, waiting for spiders to hatch out. They keep teasing me. While I was looking for egg sacs, though, this guy stood out. That’s a chonky big Steatoda borealis.

Note the light horizontal band across the front of the abdomen, and the hint of a midline stripe, all against a darkly pigmented body. These are true native spiders, found in the northern US in the midwest and east, and also in Canada. Parasteatoda tepidariorum is, apparently, also native to North and South America, but has spread all around the world, unlike these stay-at-homes.

S. borealis is also more stocky than P. tepidariorum. Here’s the latter to remind you what they look like.

Now I’ve got to wonder what has made S. borealis so well-tuned to these places with snowy winters.