Arachnologists.

I’ve been reading some taxonomy papers, and oh boy, do they groove on genitals: close-up photos, lovingly detailed camera lucida drawings, every hair and curlicue noted. Of course, they have an excuse: genitals vary between species, so they’re taxonomically diagnostic.

So this morning, I noticed one of my spiders had molted earlier — he was still a bit pale and wobbly — and had definitely graduated from pre-adolescent bulge to big hairy spiky thingumabobs. I decided that I too could pretend to be a real arachnologist and ask him all about his genitals, or palps.

Here he is at a low power. Males always look long-legged and gangly to me, but look at those big dark balls on display at the front of his face. Those are the palps, which he loads with sperm and then uses as an intromittent organ.

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This morning, as I was futzing about in the lab, I decided to give my Laowa 25mm f2.8 Ultra Macro 2.5-5.0x another shot. This is an amazing lens — look at the magnification on that thing — but I’ve been struggling to find a place for it in my workflow. It’s not an easy lens to use! Short working distance, narrow depth of field, requiring a lot of light, and having no aperture control in the camera…I haven’t got the hang of it at all. I initially thought maybe this would be a good lens to use in the lab, because it is so finicky, but has the potential for a lot of close-in detail, but no, in comparisons I did this morning, using my Wild dissecting scope with a camera tube gave me more mag, and was orders of magnitude easier to use. The Canon remote control software is dead easy: put a spider under the scope, you’ve got centimeters of working distance, and you can just click a button to capture images.

I could not imagine handing a student the Laowa and telling them to document the morphology of some spiderlings or embryos. I could show them the Canon software and scope and they’d be happily churning out data in minutes.

So it’s not a lab lens, for sure. Maybe a good field lens for tiny subjects? It would be a bit like carrying a microscope into the field, without the bulk and awkwardness. A bright sunny day, some little beast on a blade of grass, and a little patience and this thing might come into its own. All I need is a sunny summer day, which are a bit scarce right now, and I’ll take it out for some field tests.

For now, this is the best, which is far from any good, that I could capture this morning.

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Today’s hour of spider-zen was spent feeding (they were hungry — they always hunger) and tinkering with the photography lighting. The image below is a product of some experimenting: I use an LED ring light attached to the microscope, which gives a uniform brightness to everything, which isn’t always desirable. My photographs come out looking flat, with shadows mostly lost. So today I 1) used a darkfield background, and 2) fired up my halogen lamp with the fiber-optic dual goosenecks, and tried lighting more from the side. I still have some work to do, but I kind of like this image. The side-lighting and darker background is much more effective at imaging the spider silk, and the warmer lighting of the halogen added some lovely red-gold highlights to the spider.

Compared to my other recent photo, I think it’s less cartoony and much more true to life.
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Yesterday was not a good day. I had way too much on my calendar and worked late, and didn’t get around to my spiders until 5pm…and then, it was a lot of scut work, since their containers were getting filthy with insect corpses, and I had to move everyone to new, clean boxes. Then I discovered that two of my precious males had died! Males really are the weak link. There’d been a wave of moltings throughout the colony, and sometimes they just don’t succeed. I expected one to fail — he was asymmetrical, with one excessively long forelimb, and he’d probably messed up the previous molt — and yeah, sadly, he didn’t make it this time.

Whenever I move them, the spiders all go frantic with activity. The new space is barren, have to put up new webs everywhere! So I threw them each a couple of flies and left them to their business, and this morning they’re all lounging in their silk hammocks, webbing everywhere, and the flies are all trussed up. They are meticulous in their work.

So here’s one I found having a delicious breakfast. I had to stack a few images to get everything in view, so if there’s some blurriness, it’s because she was practically vibrating with happiness (I presume).

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Mary and I have been laid out flat this weekend — I shouldn’t have been so quick to suggest yesterday that my recovery from the second vaccination was relatively painless. I got the fever & chills & headache that evening, and it hasn’t been at all fun.

Then just now this pretty little Asiatic Wall Jumping spider descended from the ceiling right into my face. He’s clearly trying to cheer me up.

It worked!

The spiders I’ve been raising live to be approximately two years old in the lab. What typically happens is that they start showing signs of decline: they aren’t as responsive, they begin to hide in small silken nests, they fall into lassitude, and then one day they fall to the ground, dead. I worry that I’m doing something wrong, that the cages are too humid or not humid enough, that some disease is spreading through the colony, but I’ve tried different regimes of watering them, it makes no difference. It’s not surprising that very small animals are not evolved to endure. I tend to think “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy,” about my little friends.

They live longer than they do in the wild, at least. The past couple of summers I’ve kept my eye on a few spiders that take up residence on the outside walls of my house. They thrive for a month or two, and then one day they’re abruptly gone. There are waves of spider species that flourish over time: early in the summer, I start to see young Parasteatoda and Steatoda building cobwebs along the downspouts and under the windows; mid-summer I see them being replaced by the denser webs of grass spiders; around the time of the first frost, they’re all gone or in decline. We had a large, beautiful cat-faced spider lurking under the eaves of our house all last summer, and then in the fall we found her unmoving corpse. Every year in late summer those big yellow garden spiders take over the grasslands, building their zig-zagged orb webs and growing large enough to hog-tie grasshoppers, and then they die as winter arrives, leaving behind another generation that will overwinter in egg sacs. It’s a tough life, being a spider, especially when you live in a region with strong seasonal variation and severe climate.

And then I read about a trap-door spider in Australia that was documented as living for 43 years. I don’t consider most of Australia to have a gentle climate, but what they did have was constancy, so they could be adapted to a fairly uniform seasonal environment. She also didn’t have to cope with months of sub-zero temperatures, which are harsh on little poikilotherms, and that also wipe out the prey these predators have to consume. Even spiders in the Australian wheat belt are going to die, sometimes in even more horrific ways.

When she arrived at the clearing that day, she noticed that the twigs around the door had lost their meticulous spiral fan shape. They lay scattered in disarray.

Mason looked at the silk door, and saw a tiny hole in the center, as if something had pierced it.

She lifted the door and lowered an endoscope into the burrow, and confirmed what she already suspected. The spider was gone.

A parasitic wasp had likely broken through the seal, and laid its eggs in 16’s body.

“She was cut down in her prime,” Mason said. “It took a while to sink in, to be honest.”

On April 19, Mason, Main and Grant Wardell-Johnson co-published a paper in Pacific Conservation Biology, announcing the death of spider 16 at age 43.

She was the oldest spider known to have existed, Mason wrote, eclipsing the previous record set by a 28-year-old tarantula.

Ugh. Parasitic wasps. I think I’d rather freeze to death, or gently fade away in the decrepitude of old age.

It felt like spring yesterday, and I guess the spiders were feeling it, too.