Can I be her when I grow up?

I’m reading Tea Francis’s story, and wow, that’s me, except I waited until I was 60 to get into spiders. I wasted so much time! (Well, not really, I do have a family and a career, so I can’t complain about that.)

I have kept spiders for almost 20 years now, sometimes just one tarantula, sometimes lots of different types of spiders, but they’ve been present in some capacity ever since I was 17 or 18. After moving somewhere with more space at the beginning of last year, my collection had expanded significantly to almost 200 spiders of all different types. I decided to start an Instagram account to post about my spiders as whenever I posted anything to do with them anywhere else, I got a load of the usual ‘kill it with fire’ responses which I find grating, to say the least. I started to focus my attention on studying them a lot more closely. I invested in my very first DSLR and macro lens and set about learning how to use it. That in itself unlocked a whole new level of appreciation for them and I quickly became hopelessly, irretrievably obsessed. With new photos popping up on my Instagram feed every day, sometimes multiple times a day, they seemed to be gaining rather a lot of interest from other enthusiasts, photographers, keepers and even arachnophobes who were consciously working on overcoming their fears. This was a bit of a revelation for me & definitely a motivation to do more! I took it to Twitter as well and began posting there too, where I ended up meeting a lot of arachnology folk who were either studying towards or already active in the field I had always quietly dreamed of being involved in myself. Actually working with and researching spiders.

Then look at her lovely spider nook! It’s like fantasy land!

I’m not too jealous, though. I look at that and see a heck of a lot of maintenance work, and also sadness — most spiders aren’t that long-lived, so there’s always death among the beloved horde. Also, this would be a terrifying time to be at the start of a science career. Stay strong, Ms Francis!

Here come the grooms

This morning, we were gathering Parasteatoda around the house, and I guess that it’s that time of year, because we found lots of active males cruising around. We got four males right here! I just brought them in to the lab to join the lonely, love-starved females there. I’ll check back again in a few days and hope I don’t find that they were hungry for something else, leaving drained corpses everywhere.

I put a few photos of these handsomely endowed males (really, their palps are huge) on Instagram and Patreon.

2020 AAS Virtual Summer Symposium

Oh, happy news: the American Arachnology Society meetings were cancelled this summer, but they’re going ahead with the 2020 AAS Virtual Summer Symposium on 25-29 June. I can gladly do that! I’m an expert at sitting on my butt in my office staring at a screen!

It’s free if you happen to be a member of the AAS. Non-members can attend for the cost of a $10 donation to the American Arachnological Society.

The Mystery of the Old Gazebo

The other daaaay, we’d gone walking around the Pomme de Terre river, and just off the bike trail there is an old gazebo. It’s weathered, lichen-covered, and a bit creaky, but it’s also covered with spectacular orb webs, so we were curious to find out who was living there.

We poked around, and a couple of spiders scurried out, but I was baffled…the ones we caught didn’t look like orb weavers, they seemed to be Theridion, or social cobweb spiders. I guess they’re just lurking, taking advantage of any small prey caught in another spider’s web. The actual weavers of those webs couldn’t be found anywhere. I suspect the reason for that is that smack in the middle of the gazebo is a swallow’s nest, so any reasonably large spider is going to hide during the day an only emerge at night.

We’re tempted to revisit at night, except that another feature of the gazebo is all the hearts and INITIALS+INITIALS carved into the wood. We might interrupt more mammalian activity.

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Yeah, but was it a radioactive spider?

Three boys in Bolivia found a black widow spider.

“Thinking it would give them superhero powers, they prodded it with a stick until it bit each of them in turn,” the official, Virgilio Pietro, said.

The boy’s mom found them crying, so she rushed the siblings to a nearby health center, which transferred them to a nearby hospital, Telemundo said.

They’re fine now. They did not turn into spider-boys.

Note that they had to torture the spider to get it to bite them in the first place. Don’t do that. Don’t blame the spider. The spider knows that with great venom comes great responsibility, and that boys taste yucky.

Back to the spider grind

I took a tour of my house this morning to see how the spiders were shaping up. I found lots, even more than I did last week. Some were familiar, like Attulus fasciger, who had captured a mosquito-like creature. Good work, young lady!

Of course there were lots of Salticus scenicus around.

The exciting but somewhat disappointing discovery was that Parasteatoda abounded — they’d colonized several inset corners of the house and areas around the downspouts, where they had good cover and great places to hide.

The disappointing part was my own failure: I couldn’t get a good picture of any of them! They were all living in little houses made of plant debris, and if I tapped on them to ask them to come out, they did a typical Parasteatoda thing: they’d immediately bungee straight down to the ground. They’re conveniently predictable when trying to catch them, but I just wanted to say hello and take a picture.
To see what I mean about the difficulty, I saved one photo of one tucked into a bit of dried flower petal, with just her blurry butt sticking out.

I’ve got 4 of these spider nests tagged now, and I’ll be back tomorrow and will try to get some better pictures. Except I think we’ve got thunderstorms predicted for Sunday…so maybe a little later.

You can see the photos, if you really want to, on Patreon or Instagram, as usual.