We were not eaten by grues!

We spent a few hours at UMM’s EcoStation this morning. It’s out by the Grue Church, at the end of Grue Church Lane, just off of Grue Church Road. We made sure to visit in daylight — you wouldn’t want to be there after dark. You might get eaten.

Spoiler: We weren’t eaten. It was swarming with insects and spiders, though, which was the whole point — despite the ugly gray weather, we had a grand time lying in the muck and watching the spiders come out to play. And there weren’t too many ticks, and mosquitos didn’t bother us!

I put the rest of the story, including photos of some pretty spiders, in a public post on Patreon.

My first Pirate Spider

The other day, I caught a spider I didn’t recognize — this is not at all uncommon, I’m an amateur trying to learn — and I had to post it on iNaturalist to get it identified. It was a Pirate Spider! I’d never seen one before. If you’re not familiar with pirate spiders, they’ve earned their name: they are predators of spiders that board other spider’s webs and kill the owner and loot her of her life, arrrr.

Pirate spiders are members of the spider group that includes all the “orb weavers” – those that make the prototypical, circular webs we are all familiar with – but they do not make webs.

In fact, they have lost the ability. They can still produce silk, which they use to build egg sacs and wrap prey. But they are anatomically incapable of spinning a web. The number of silk “spigots” on their spinnerets is dramatically small compared to their relatives.

Instead, they invade the webs of other spiders, in a bid to lure and then kill the hapless architect. Gently, they pluck the strings of the web, enticing the host to approach.

Once the host spider has ventured close enough, the pirate makes its move.

First, it encloses its duped prey within its two enormous front legs. These are fringed with massive spines, called “macrosetae”, which they use to trap the host within a prison-like basket.

Then, the final move: the pirate bites its prey and uses its fangs to inject a powerful venom that instantly immobilises it.

I include my photo below the fold.

[Read more…]

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.