My nurse let me out on an adventure! I got to see a bit of the prairie garden at the university — I saw it for a long time because I was moving at a snail’s pace past this little patch.

The real purpose of the outing, though, is that it’s been 6 days since I’d been in the lab, and while spiders are hardy beasts that do prefer being left alone, I have to occasionally give them something to eat. So, mealworms and flies all around!

Despite my neglect, the spiders know what season it is, and they’ve been producing egg sacs for me, so another duty I had was to separate eggs from mothers and move them into the special temperature and humidity controlled incubator. I’m accumulating a little collection, labeled Sbor, Ptep, and Lmac, all quietly thriving and awaiting their moment of emergence. I’m going to try and get in to the lab more frequently because they’ll be hatching out soon.

You need to include a scale with these images, Riley Black!

I need to know how many tons a Jurassic spider weighed.

Mary found this Bold Jumper while gardening.

I have moved it into luxurious housing in my lab, along with a few flies and a juicy mealworm.

All of my friends seem to be spiders nowadays.

I collected my first spider egg sac of the summer — see, that means summer is finally here — and I got to load up the egg incubator.

Some of you might protest that that’s a device design for chicken eggs, but that’s just what Big Chicken wants you to think. It’s calibrated for 28°C and 65% humidity, which is perfect for spiders, and I also bought some decorative plastic ovoids from a craft store that might, from a distance, look a bit like chicken eggs, but I’m putting spider egg sacs in them.

I’m just saying, next time you crack an egg for your breakfast, you might be surprised at what comes swarming out.

In our yard, building a web, it’s a little baby spiderling only about 2mm long.

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.