Usually, Jenny By-The-Front-Door is huddled up inside her nest, and at best I see a waving leg or three. Tonight, though, she made a rare appearance. Isn’t she beautiful?
I really want to dig into the intricate pigment patterns on Parasteatoda abdomens.
One day old. This was a tough photo to take — the little spiderlings respond to any touch with frantic escape behavior and end up running all over the place, and they refuse to pose nicely for a picture.
I note that even shortly after emergence they have the banded legs and scattering of dark abdominal pigment.
That’s right, #Arachtober is a thing with swarms of people posting photos of their fave spiders this month. It doesn’t seem quite right to me, because October is a sad month for spiders in Minnesota — I’m seeing them fading away as the weather cools and their prey declines and we approach the terrible frost and frigid winter. Here’s Jenny By-The-Front-Door, for instance.
I’ve been checking on her every day. She’s not very active; she’s huddled in her nest cobbled out of dead leaves and debris, and I can see her legs peeking out, and if I poke at the nest with my finger, she’ll slowly wave at me, but she’s nowhere near as busy as the spiders are in the warm summer months. I expect that one of these days I’ll give her a little poke and she won’t respond. She’ll either be in diapause or dead.
I still have lots of thriving spiders in the climate controlled environment of my lab, at least!
Yesterday, as we were traveling, we made a stop at a rest area to look for spiders, as one does. It was a terrible day for spider-kind, with intermittent rain and constant mist and cold, so it was mostly a fruitless search. I did find one sad, bedraggled looking Parasteatoda clinging to the underside of a handrail, with a fat drop of water beading up on her tattered web, and she fled as soon as my camera lens nudged in her direction. Just to make her day even worse, I then scooped up a couple of egg sacs she had in her nest, stealing her babies to bring back to the lab.
This morning as I grabbed the vial of sacs from the Big Spunk rest area to bring in to work, I noticed that they had hatched out! Baby spiderlings everywhere! They were probably triggered by being brought in to a nice warm house.
If someone is passing by Big Spunk today, could you stop in and tell their mama that her babies have found a good home, and we’ll take care of them? Probably more of these will survive here than they would in a drizzly empty wilderness where even the mosquitos weren’t flying.
I’ve been trying to keep an eye on the spiders living outside my house as fall transitions steadily into winter. It’s mildly tragic — the thriving summer population of Parasteatoda has been declining, and part of it, I suspect, has been competition and predation, and perhaps a bit of starvation. The mosquitos aren’t quite as thickly swarming as they were in the heat of the summer, and the funnel web spiders, with their grand sheets of webbing, have been edging out the cobweb spiders. The one I called Judy With-The-Big-Leaf who had captured a large, curled, dead leaf and was nesting inside it on the north corner of my house is gone now, and in her place are a couple of funnel webs with their silky tunnels extending in the gap between the siding and the rain gutters. I’ve noticed that Agelenopsis begins with web building down near the ground and expands upwards, so the only Parasteatoda left are in more elevated locations. Poor Judy, she built her nest fairly low to the ground and was overtaken by pushy late-comers.
Jenny By-The-Front-Door, on the other hand, has built a fortress on the wall above the front porch, at about chest height on me, and there don’t seem to be any competitors near by. She’s been building. Wind-blown leaves and seed pods are her construction material, and also some grainy clumps of, I think, insulation that were lying on the ground. She’s actually hoisted them up about a meter and a half to incorporate them, and has been stitching everything together with silk. Here’s her nest as it currently stands.
Can you spot her? I’ll reveal her location below the fold.
I’ve been wrestlin’ spiderlings all day, although they’re getting big enough that they’re showing sexual characteristics, like enlarged palps in the males, so maybe they’re more like spider-teens. They’re about three weeks old — I showed you the newly emerged S. triangulosa a while back. I’m currently raising three species (maybe four) of Theridiidae, P. tepidariorum, S. triangulosa, and S. borealis, and I’m seeing that some of the patterns emerge fairly early and in predictable ways.
This is P. tepidariorum, the most common of these spiders, and the one I’m raising for experimental studies in the lab. Some of its obvious characteristics are the mottled abdomen — although it’s still specifically patterned, as you might see from the clear left/right symmetry — and the dark banding around the limb joints. Less obviously from the photo, one other feature is that they build 3-dimensional webs that take full advantage of the space they’re in. When I open up the container, they’re hanging suspended in the middle of the space.
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Yes! This video speaks the truth!
Today is my free day, and I’m looking forward to just hanging out in the lab with the spiders all day long today. I’ve got some tedium to take care of — bottle-washing — but I also have my S. triangulosa babies to examine for changing pigment patterns, and a lot of P. tepidariorum babies I have to upgrade to new containers, and a lot of egg sacs to harvest, and, sadly, a few adults who have died that I’ll clean out and replace with new stock. A busy day of spidering ahead!
Also, one faculty meeting and probably a few students with questions stopping by, so it’s not all spiders.
I told you we’re seeing one of the Parasteatoda in the lab is building a fairly dense nest. Today we took a walk around the house and we’re seeing that all the Theridiidae are getting into some intense nest construction. Here’s one example by our front door:
I had gently poked that nest with my finger, and the occupant dropped out of it; you can see her in the photo. I’ll include some closeups below the fold. The nest is a tangle of debris strung together, with at least three egg sacs at the top (at least one had already hatched out).
There was another around the corner, made from a captured leaf.
I’ll be checking on these and any others I find as winter closes in. I’ll be interested to see if they survive the prairie winds, and how they cope with snow and freezing cold. Will a crop of spiderlings emerge in the spring?
Oh my. Oh my oh my. While I was out at our climate strike event, I had to, naturally enough, prowl around for spiders, and there she was, hanging out behind the door of the men’s restroom at Green River Park, a stunning beauty, a classic Steatoda borealis, her body all dark and gleaming in confident repose. She’s perfect.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o’er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek and o’er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,—
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.
