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.

Here, have a few. These are from my collection of juvenile P. tepidariorum.

I can tell this one is going to be a big boy.

Webs! This one is an artist.

While this one is looking at me and making mystical gestures.

Hey, I’ve had dozens and dozens of trick-or-treaters come to my house tonight, and I’m nearly out of candy. Would it be OK if I started handing out spiders?

…who’s the fairest of them all?

Repeat after me: coxa, trochanter, femur, patella, tibia, metatarsus, tarsus. Repeat 8 times. Now you can name all the segments in a spider limb!

So flexible!

Here’s a juvenile S. borealis, ventral side up, on a bright orange background.

S. borealis is different — where P. tepidariorum builds intricate three-dimensional webs and likes to hang suspended in space in the middle of them, borealis hugs corners and surfaces, and builds denser, sheet-like webs. They just have a different lifestyle.

It’s unfortunate that she wouldn’t roll over for me, because she has a lovely white dorsal median stripe on a dark body.

This one is P. tepidariorum, and is just a wee little baby, less than two weeks old…but filling out fast.

You might be able to see wisps of its web, but it just doesn’t show up well on this light blue background. I tried to highlight it by misting the container with water, which is why you see little droplets everywhere.

I’m still taking this new lens on a shakedown, working out effective ways to photograph developing spiders. Today was all about trying to get a feel for where the focus is (spoiler: it’s way out there) and how to position camera and lights and specimen, so nothing exciting to report.

So which background do you like, light or dark?

I’m kind of leaning towards the darker backgrounds, since it brings out the webs they’re on, and a spider is intimately connected to its web. On the other hand, since the goal here is to map pigment development, the lighter background makes that snap a bit more and removes the distractions, at the expense of leaving the subject looking like it’s floating in space.

Both photos are of the same animal, Steatoda triangulosa, a young juvenile that’s about a month and a half old.