We go from the sublime to the hideous. When we were doing our routine check for egg sacs the other day, we discovered that Brienne had produced a nice one for us, deep in the elaborate network of webbing she had built in her box. It’s the pale oval on the lower left in this photo.

But…no Brienne. She had disappeared. Look below the egg sac above — there’s a tangled mess below it. I zoomed in on it. It’s an ogre’s nest, apparently.

Ick. Dead flies, bits of dead cricket carapace, all strung together with thick, ropey cables of webbing. Spiders make multiple kinds of web, you know, and these spiders will make cables of web silk that are remarkably tough and hard even for humans to break. I tugged at these with forceps, and nope, they aren’t going anywhere, shy of ripping out the whole structure and possibly injuring its occupant.

Yeah, Brienne is hiding deep inside, the dark shadow near the center of the nest.

These animals always surprise me. They’ve got a complex range of behaviors, and I have no idea what triggered this strange construction. The other spiders in the colony aren’t doing it. I’ve seen a few examples of spiders cobbling together debris into shelters, but it’s not universal, and usually they aren’t this thickly armored and enclosed.

Next they’re going to start assembling tools and weapons, and then you’d better look out.

I was at our student summer research presentations. Look at this clever pair, showing off their poster to a milling mob. They did good work.

But now I get to go home and pass out, maybe get some dinner.

At last, I’m useful! I was called to a colleague’s office because a big ol’ spider was squatting on their papers, staring at them, so I was summoned to capture the beast. I wasn’t too useful, though, since it fled under the desk and we couldn’t find it again. But later a brave student, Sophie, encountered it and scooped it up, and here it is. It’s Agelenopsis, a grass spider, perfectly harmless, but good sized for its species.

I will remind everyone that we’re hiring an ecologist, and one of the bonuses of working here is that I’ll be at your beck and call to handle any office spiders. Or if I fail, we have many bold strong students who are not at all intimidated by monstrous creatures.

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I made a stop to check on that lovely Argiope at the local Subway…and she was gone! I was very sad. So I made a trip out to our sludgy Lake Crystal to see if there was anything cool out there, and there was! There was a long girl hanging out in the grass along the shore.

Tetragnathid, obviously, a long-jawed orbweaver. How long?

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After I was done protesting yesterday (lie: we’re never done protesting), it was late, it had been a long day, and I was too tired to cook, so I just picked up some wraps at Subway. The Sandwich Artist, who is also a student at UMM, said, “Hey, aren’t you really into spiders?” Yes, of course, my reputation is spreading, I guess. “There’s a big spider on the window over there, it’s been here for several days.”

Of course I looked.

I came back this morning when the light was good, with my camera. There she was, with a big orb web against the glass…Argiope aurantia.

It was impressive, especially since it’s been so chilly lately. I noticed the stabilimentum on the web are rather disorganized and scraggly — a kind of disordered denser mess around the center of the orb here. But she was huge and pretty, and most conveniently right at eye height. This was shot with just my 17-85mm zoom lens, nothing fancy, and I’m tempted to go back later with my good macro setup and get some closeups.

Behold, the brave little redback!

It has taken down a massive foe, a mouse many times its size, requiring multiple bites and a vast quantity of silk to properly wrap it. The redback’s reward is a filling meal of liquified mouse and the appreciation of thousands of impressed viewers around the world.

Spider taxonomy drives me cross-eyed. Today I was working on sorting egg sacs, tearing them away from their mommies, who don’t like that one bit — they’re very protective. I’m learning to tell the different species apart without a microscope. For instance, Steatoda triangulosa has a distinctive zig-zag of pigment on their abdomen that looks like a row of triangles from above, and they also have nearly spherical egg sacs that are white, have a fluffy surface, and are often semi-transparent. Parasteatoda, on the other hand, has an irregular mottling that sometimes looks roughly stripey, and their egg sacs are football-shaped, beige, and have an opaque leathery/papery surface (there are two species of Parasteatoda around here, P. tepidariorum and P. tabulata, which I haven’t learned to distinguish — it requires careful scrutiny of their genitalia — and my live spiders refuse to sit still long enough to poke around their private parts). Those are my rules, they’re what helps me figure out who is what.

So today I’m parting Lyanna from her egg sac…here’s Lyanna:

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