I didn’t expect it, but wow, black widows are incredibly lazy. They find a corner and park their large butts there and don’t move at all, all day long. I know they wander about at night stringing silk all over the place, but otherwise, they’re like sulking teenagers who don’t wanna do nothin’ whenever you look at them. Boring!

Or are they?

I think maybe I haven’t been feeding them right. Yesterday, I caught a small grasshopper in our garden, and I tossed it into the black widow container. It bounced off a couple of strands of silk, and the effect was electric: the widow leapt out of her corner and stood poised in the center, suspended on its web, looking extraordinarily alert. She wasn’t looking directly at the hopper, but was delicately touching multiple lines — you could tell she was poised to sense any motion in her trap.

The moment was tense and dramatic.

The hopper moved. The widow instantly charged at it, tried to use her hind legs to tangle it up, and failed, so she retreated back to her central lookout. The hopper was terrified, and remained motionless for at least 5 minutes, while the spider was also motionless, but alert.

Finally, the hopper took a small step, and the widow surged forward and snared it with more silk. The hopper was kicking frantically, trying to leap away, but was hampered by the strong sticky silk, and every leap tangled it further in all that silk. So much silk. Finally, the black widow gave it one little kiss, and the hopper was almost instantly dead. Then she dragged her prey up to her calm quiet corner and ate.

I’ve been feeding her mealworms all this time. Maybe it’s not the spider that’s boring, but the food I’ve been giving her. The next feeding day is Tuesday, I think I’m going to have to buy a box of crickets.

I saw this and had to stick my head in a grungy, stinky box to take this photo.

See it? There was a mama Parasteatoda tending her egg sac. Right there in the middle! You can’t miss it.

I scooped it up, and will be taking it into the lab. Maybe this is easier to see?

The spiders are laying eggs all over the place and tucking their sacs into odd corners all around the yard and the house. It’s like an easter egg hunt!

I didn’t tell you the whole story about our local Argiope. In fact, I cropped the photo I used by a lot — I left out that spider’s consort. Here’s the whole thing.

The female is on the right, that smaller, more gracile spider on the left is a male.

The thing about nephilid mating is that when the male gets lucky, one of the last things he does, once he gets his palp into the female epigyne, is to snap it off — that is, he voluntarily castrates himself and leaves the organ inside her. It acts as block to further mating by other males.

In addition, he builds a web very close to the female’s, and stations himself there to deter any males that might wander along and try courting her. That little guy in the left corner is a eunuch guard!

I know, that sounds creepy and stalkerish, and as I always tell people, the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy, so don’t take this as an example. Maybe Dolomedes is a more attractive role model: the males don’t do the eunuch guardian thing at all, they just up and die on the spot as soon as they achieve copulation, and leave their lifeless corpse dangling from the female’s nether bits until it falls off. Carrying around the dead body of former partner’s is an excellent way to get other males to leave you alone.

I don’t recommend that for human women, either. It would work, though!

On LiveScience:

On MSN:

On Philadelphia TV news:

These are all nonsense. Virtually all spiders are venomous, and the Joro spider does not have particularly strong venom and isn’t a hazard to humans. The “flying” bit is just a reference to the spiderlings’ dispersal method of using strands of silk to loft themselves into the air — the adults are much too large and heavy to do that.

At least NPR gets the story straight.

That is correct: harmless. Harmless to people, at least — there is concern that the Joro spider will displace other resident spider species.

But these are magnificent animals.

What’s also annoying to me is that we already have large orb-weaving spiders of similar size living in these same places that the Joro is invading. We have Argiope aurantia already.

These tend not to live in cities or places particularly close to people — they eat large insects, like grasshoppers. If your home is swarming with hoppers all over, then yes, maybe Argiope or Joro will set up shop in your neighborhood, and take out the grasshoppers. I’ve seen fallow fields around my home that are densely overgrown with grasses and where the grasshoppers are leaping all around you as you walk through the brush, and I’ll see Argiope spiders populating every square meter. They don’t get headlines, though, because they’re harmless and leave people alone.

Maybe I’ll have to record a video of one of these spectacularly dense Argiope sites this year — they usually start popping up in August, so you’ll have to wait a bit.

Finally! First egg sac of the season, along with its attentive mom, who didn’t want to be separated from it.

All of the black widows have been fed! Here’s Verðandi just as she delivered a fatal bite to a mealworm.

Once again, the background is the lid of the container, annoyingly. Black widows are not very dynamic pets, since they like to just sit in one place and wait for their prey, and they don’t do much and are mostly inactive. I guess when you’re that pretty you can afford to be so lazy.