It’s been one of those days.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It’s been one of those days.
Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!
I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.
I told you I was running away from home this afternoon! I was walking for 2 or 3 hours, and now my quads are killing me–I’ve been sedentary for too long. I didn’t have much luck finding any interesting spiders, but the bushes are alive with spider food, swarms of gnats and midges, and if you feed them they will come.
As soon as I got home, of course, I find a spider on my garage door. It’s a very small Attulus fasciger, and it has been hunting successfully. That’s a midge of some sort, totally wrecked in the spiders jaws.
Asiatic Wall Jumping Spider
More will be coming. It is that time of year. Hooray!
I’ve been checking this one spot along my walk to work all Spring, a row of metal signposts along a parking lot. These are simply dark metal objects that absorb what heat there is, and while they look barren and uninteresting, they have been a reliable home for a population of small spiders.
On Sunday, I saw nothing there. Yesterday, Monday, I saw this:
It’s silk. Just a few strands of spider silk across the bar, telling me that spiders have moved in. All of the signposts have silk to varying degrees, suggesting that maybe there was a recent hatch and a spider swarm is repopulating the area.
It’s reassuring to see, even as I’m buried under grading. Just two weeks to go before the semester ends and 6 months of sabbatical begins.
Blue seems to like her new housing. She even likes the artificial flowers I gave her, climbing to the top and pressing her face against the glass.
She’s been living in a plexiglas cube that used to be quite comfortable for her, but that pile of molts I keep on top is testimony that she just keeps on growing.
So crowded. So shabby. So this morning I relocated her to a huge, roomy 29 gallon fish tank, about 75cm x 25cm, with high class furnishings.
If you want to see it, you can get the full story on Patreon.
OK, if you don’t want to subscribe, I’ve also posted a photo on Instagram.
This video is about an hour and 20 minutes long, but the time flew by watching it. You can learn all about the black widow here, it’s worth the time.
I arrived at my office door this morning, and what do I see?
I didn’t do it.
I’m going to have to scoop them up and bring them inside before the custodians dispose of them.
Male tarantulas, when they reach sexual maturity, are focused on wandering away to find sex, to the point where they may lose interest in eating.
Females, on the other hand, turn into voracious consumers of calories.
Blue wants her morning mealworm, and strikes like lightning.
