But I don’t think my spiders would be able to move. Look at Texanne here; she’s so bloated she’s not going to step out of that corner, I don’t think.
A few others are purging themselves into egg sac construction.
Anyway, I’ll check on them tomorrow, and as soon as they get active again I’ll throw them some more bugs full of ichor. The menu for Monday is mealworms.
Today was not a good day. My mission was to sort out the prisoners the newly emerged spiders into separate containers, and also to try to document the morphology of 4 day old Steatoda triangulosa. I started out well enough, using a small paintbrush to delicately pluck out the babies and move them, and then to snap their picture.
First problem: somehow, my scope had drifted out of whack, and the eyepieces were no longer parfocal with each other, or with the camera tube. This demanded immediate fixing, especially since the photos were coming out blurry and bad.
These were not acceptable. So I spent an hour fussing over the optics, tweaking the eyepieces, taking a bunch of photos of the tips of watchmaker forceps, etc., etc., etc., until I thought everything was nicely aligned. Then resume shifting spiders.
I was feeling pretty darned competent, deftly plucking up itty-bitty baby spiders, lifting them by their dragline to a new home, and then tossing them a few fruit flies. I got so confident that I deftly knocked over the source container, sending baby spiders flying all over the floor. Oops. Sorry, neighbors. Don’t worry, they won’t go far. I was down on my hands and knees trying to find them, but nope, they are very tiny and I’m pretty sure they made it to the Swiss border. I expect they’ll colonize the space under my benches quite nicely.
Well, that was about ten spiderlings lost in the architecture. So I decided I’d check out this large collection of egg sacs brought back from Texas. At a glance, though, I could tell they’d already all hatched out — after embryogenesis, they molt, and you can see the rumpled white sheet they’ve discarded inside, and then before they emerge, they molt again, leaving their spider-shaped cuticles behind. To be sure, I opened up the sacs and looked carefully, and nope, nothing but shed leg chitin everywhere.
No more spiderlings to deal with today. I do have some egg sacs in the adult cages that will probably hatch out in ten days or so.
Oh well. While I was down on my hands and knees, I did discover a previous escapee near the floor and baseboards. She was looking good!
I don’t know what she’s been living on, but she’s grown. I like to think my lab is a healthy, biologically rich environment, though, so it’s good news. I thought about scooping her up and putting her in the incubator, but instead decided to throw down some fruit flies. She snapped them up fast!
Don’t tell the custodian.
This has been a klutzy day, so I’m out of the lab for a bit, will focus on preparing for class tomorrow instead.
Yesterday, I fed my spiders waxworms, and they went mad for them. Their cages were festooned with dead or paralyzed grubs, and the spiders were sucking out their guts. It was all very charming. Today, though, I come in to find cages littered with blackened corpses, the effects of all that necrotic venom and digestive enzymes. Yuck. All of the spiders were bloated and engorged and had retreated to shadowy corners to digest. Except one, that was eager to use all her energy for a new purpose: Trillian made an egg sac! I just had to record her proud moment.
They’re such sweet little monsters.
Tomorrow, I get to clean out the decaying corpses. I’m feeling a bit like an Igor now.
Apparently, I’ve been starving my poor babies, because I showed up with a big new menu item for lunch and those spiders were on it, pumping these waxworms full of venom and chowing down on maggoty soup. Yum!
A few details: the spider is named Selena, she’s from San Antonio, Texas, and her species is Steatoda triangulosa. The victim is a waxworm from a bait shop in Alexandria, Minnesota. All was recorded with a Canon t5i and a Tokina 100mm f/2.8 macro lens (hint: don’t use the autofocus on this, it’s slow and noisy, and doesn’t track little spiders well). Selena wasn’t special, all the spiders in my colony reacted with this kind of zeal to the plump bounty dropped in their laps.
If this were a horror movie scenario, I’d be doomed. There I am, puttering around in the lab, feeding my pretties, when I notice that one of the egg sacs from Texas has hatched out, and there in the container was a small swarm of babies. “Oooh,” I cooed, and took them over to a clear spot on the bench so I could sort them out. I took the lid off and set it to the side — no worries with these little guys, they’re slow and content to just rest there on their web, and I took a few baby pictures.
Then…little did I know but this container also held the mama spider. She had been lurking, hanging from the lid, and I hadn’t even realized that there was a large adult in the container.
On the lid…that I had just mindlessly set aside without even looking at it. She crept out and pounced, leaping upon my exposed right hand, racing across it, probably looking for a good vein to rip into! That was the first I noticed her, an unexpected tickling across the back of my hand. She’s a big one, too, so I just scooped her into a handy plastic box. And there she is, looking a bit pissed off.
I named her Texanne, Texanne of the Texas triangulosas, and this was the best photo I could get while she was furiously skittering about. I’ve now moved her into a spacious cage with some flies to nibble on. Once she has calmed down, I’ll try to get some good photos of her abdominal pattern.
But yeah, now I’ve got a lot of Steatoda triangulosa, unexpectedly. That’s fine, they’re pretty and elegant, and seem to be doing well in the lab.
I got these new spiders from Texas last week, and they aren’t adjusting very well. Usually what the new gals do when I put them in a nice big roomy empty cage is that they start filling the space with webbing, pick a nice spot somewhere in the middle, and hang upside down, waiting for it to start raining flies. Not these spiders. There a few short patches of cobweb here and there, but mainly they sit huddled in a corner and don’t bother coming out. Compare Lantana today with Lantana last week — she seems to have scarcely moved.
I guess I can’t blame her. How would you feel if I picked you up in Texas and hauled you all the way up to Minnesota in November? It sounds cruel, even to me, and I prefer my northern state.
Yes, it’s snowing right now. But that’s outside! These spiders are all in a nice warm lab with a 14/10 light dark cycle!
This presenter is having a grand time watching people cope with huntsman spiders. Panic never seems to work, does it?
The one time I was in Australia, I didn’t notice any spiders at all. Clearly I need to go back and correct that omission.
Easy. They’re in my house.
It’s been consistently cool out here in Minnesota — temperatures have been right around 0°C, we’ve had a little light rain, a little snow. It’s not a happy time for spiders outdoors, and not at all good for their prey. The mosquitos are mostly dead! I see an occasional fly, but mostly the local arthropods are busy diapausing or retired to refugia or migrating away, while some are in their larval stages hiding away in lakes and streams. It’s not easy being a spider right now.
Mary of the piercing eyes spotted these little ones spinning away in out of the way places in our kitchen, though. They’re tiny, little more than dots, but they’d put up barely visible webs under a windowsill, possibly hoping to catch the rare fruit fly from the produce we keep on the counter. I had to zoom in with my camera lens to recognize them, and yes, they’re Parasteatoda.
They’re lucky, now they get to go into my lab where they’ll get a more reliable diet.
P.S. They’re not all in my house. There are some hanging out in your house, too.
This morning I set up some housing for a few of my new Texas imports, moving them out of their cramped vials and into big roomy spaces with cardboard frames. As usual, they were a bit frantic and were scurrying all over the place at first — I found the easiest way to shift them was to let them come out onto my hand, and then hold them gently over their new digs, and often they’d just drop a dragline and rappel down into their new home, and if they didn’t, a gentle nudge with a paintbrush would send them on their way.
They’re still a little bit stressed. After running around in circles for a bit, they found a comfy corner of the frame and just hunkered down and refused to move further. I left them a few flies and then took some photos before leaving them alone to settle in. I assume they’ll saturate the space with webbing and then hang somewhere comfortable, but that’ll take a few days.
Here are a few photos of them sullenly occupying a corner. They are all Steatoda triangulosa.
Oh no. Even warm cozy Earth isn’t safe from the nihilism of the void. Here’s a story about parasitic wasps that lay their eggs on spiders. It’s another horrible tale of zombie arthropods, their endocrine system hijacked by wasp larvae to force them to build a nice silken web to house the wasp.
After the web is spun, the nearly mature wasp overlord injects the spider with poison, finally killing it. But in terms of free will, Eberhard says, the spider has been dead all along.
“Once the spider has been stung by the female wasp, it’s effectively reproductively dead,” Eberhard tells Newscripts. “It’s maybe going to live for another couple of weeks, but it now has that egg on it, and later the larva, and so it’s done for.”
Unfortunately for the spider, it doesn’t end with death. After killing the spider, the newly hatched wasp regurgitates digestive fluid onto the host body and sucks out its insides for nutrients. Dracula, surely, would be proud.
We live in a dark universe, obviously.
