There hasn’t been much fertility in this lab, and I don’t know what’s going on. The spiders are getting weird and lazy. Here’s Yara (last seen here), who has been building thick clumpy cobwebs and also assembling debris into a nest — she’s partly obscured by a wood shaving here. The strange thing is above her, and to the left.

Those are unhappy looking eggs enclosed in a thin web, not an egg sac. I can say with some confidence that they’re not going to develop.

This is awkward and annoying. Next week I’m going to sterilize cages with alcohol and set up new frames and repopulate, hoping this problem will go away. Maybe they’re stressed? Maybe they’re just old and lapsing into decrepitude?

I was just admiring this S. triangulosa that I found in the science building — an escapee returning to home? — and had to take a few photos. She’s very striking, with this high contrast black & white coloration.

I’ll tuck it below the fold for the arachnophobes.

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Anyone want to buy me a ticket to Brisbane?

I politely informed this little grass spider that I was not interested in a ménage à trois.

Before I left for the Twin Cities this weekend, I’d fed the spider colony fat juicy waxworms, and they fell upon them furiously. Today I checked on them, and boy were there a lot of bloated, indolent spiders lounging about in their webs, reluctant to even move. One surprise…I took a peek at Yara, who I’ve photographed before, and the change was striking, not just in her size, but in her pigment patterns.

Look how dark she is! This isn’t just the lighting, either — I tinkered a fair bit to get good illumination. Compare it to the previous photo, where she’s much lighter in color, and I would have said she was one of the more lightly pigmented members of the colony. Now I’m wondering how rapidly they can change color and what prompts it, especially since I’ve been following pigment development in the babies.

I was also looking at cobwebs today. There might be some potential for student projects here.

Mary has been away the last few weeks, helping Skatje and Kyle handle a ravening, demanding 15-month old, Iliana. She finally got back home last night, and she brought me a present! It was a spider. No one is surprised.

Well, I was, a little bit. Spiders show so much variation — I’m pretty sure this is Steatoda triangulosa, as it’s obviously a theridiidid, and it’s got that pretty pair of zig-zag stripes down the abdomen, but it’s so golden, and it’s got more zigs than I usually see in S. triangulosa here in Minnesota, and the patterns break up in a messy and different way. Species are so goddamned complicated. Why did I ever leave my nice, inbred, isolated zebrafish?

Anyway, she was guarding a nest in my daughter’s garage, and Mary brought back 6 egg sacs, all of the fluffy type we see with S. triangulosa. Most, probably all, are hatched out, but I’ll find out when I take them into the lab later.

I need this:

It’s spidercloth, a single piece of silky fabric made from silk drawn from a million spiders. It might be a little bit labor intensive.

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.

So I can’t pick up a spidercloth cloak at Target?

We’re going to have to figure out the chemistry, and we also have to figure out the machinery in spinnerets.

Of course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk isn’t very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk or companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical scaffold or an alternative to Kevlar armor. Several groups have tried inserting spider genes into bacteria (or even cows and goats) to produce silk, but so far, the attempts have been only moderately successful.

Part of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk.

Well? Get right on that!

I was not going to go into the university today. It is miserable outside — bitter cold, stiff winds, piles of drifting snow — and I had resolved to stay warm indoors and focus on getting prepped for spring term classes. And I did! I was about to post the first homework assignment for my class, and I was double-checking all the details, when I noticed that the list of textbook problems was from the 10th edition of Concepts of Genetics, while the syllabus specifies the 11th edition. Oh no, crap. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that this publisher loves to fuck around with problem numbers. They may not have changed a thing in the content between editions, but they will still juggle around the order of the problems and call it a new “edition”.

I did not have a copy of the textbook at home. Therefore, I had to put my pants on — and boots and scarf and hat and gloves and heavy coat — and wade out into the wilderness to my office. Yikes, but it was cold. There were knee-high drifts of snow on the sidewalks at the university, which has not been cleared at all since we’re still officially on break. I nearly lost my hat to the wind twice. I stumbled in one drift and twisted my ankle…I think it’s OK, but it was also numbed by the cold, and I’ve been discovering that all I have to do is roll over in bed nowadays and something will ache, so I’ll probably be feeling that tomorrow. But I got my copy of the textbook! I staggered home, sat down, and started to pull out the changes when…sudden terrifying thought, what is the latest publishers edition?

It’s 12. Not 11, not 10, 12. I don’t have a copy of that. Goddammit.

Oh well, I’ll do the extra work I’ve often had to do: I post the problem numbers of the edition I’ve got, with the beginning phrase of the problem, and tell the students to figure it out. You know what we’re doing this first week? A review of basic probability and statistics, and an overview of simple Mendelian genetics, stuff that hasn’t changed in 50 to a hundred years, but we’re going to gouge $174.25 out of the students to get the latest arrangement of textbook problems.

(I do tell the students they should feel free to order older, much cheaper editions because of this absurdity.)

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On the bright side of things, I had a chance to duck into the lab and check on Mrs Yara and Mr Chad. No eggs yet, but I’ll put some photos below the fold.

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