I am so relieved. If they didn’t, this trip to Skepticon would have been a total waste of time.

I knew there would be, of course. Although, I took a stroll around the hotel, and it was a wasteland — it looked like the exterior had been hosed down recently, and even the few cobwebs I found were sad tattered shreds. Then I discovered the federal building behind us, and man, the windows there are dense with webs. I saw big ol’ orb weavers hanging out in massive webs that covered an entire picture window pane, and lots of my little pals, Parasteatoda, lurking in the corners. I caught a few, like the male above, that I’ll take home to start a Missouri colony. I’ll go back later and get some more.

One downside is that if you’re hanging about a federal building with a big camera with a long lens, and you keep peering at windows, I guess you look a bit suspicious. A policeman stopped by to ask, “Uh, what are you doing?” I told him, and he watched as I scooped up one in a vial, so I think he believed me. Also, it helps to look like an old white nerd (it shouldn’t, but it does. I also don’t have a Russian accent.)

Oh, and hey, the Skepticon conference starts this afternoon — the young people who organize it apparently don’t believe in getting up before 11am, so you’ve got plenty of time to get down here. Sure, go ahead, you’ve got time to look for spiders before the events start up.

We found one unusual spider today, and she was frustrating. First thing we noticed about her: she looked like our familiar Parasteatoda, except that she was half again, maybe twice the size of the house spiders we usually see. She was also relatively lightly colored, compared to the mottled brown of our familiar friends. So I caught her, with the idea that I might be able to more closely examine her in the lab. Hah. This was the most frantically active spider I’ve ever had to work with, scrabbling non-stop at the sides of the vial. I tried everything to get her to hold still and let me do some close-ups and measurements — she was having none of that.

I put her in a vial, I put her in a small petri dish to confine her. Nothing worked.

I finally just let her out to scurry about on my hand — I thought if nothing else, it would help give some perspective on her size. Have you ever tried to focus a camera and keep a spider in view as it is running all over your hand, and while you’re trying to make sure it doesn’t escape? She wasn’t cooperative at all.

One alternative, one a real arachnologist wouldn’t balk at, would be to kill and fix her, maybe even do a little dissection. The thing is…I’ve never killed a spider, not even in my lab work, and I’d like to maintain that record. I’m a biologist, dammit, I study life, not death, and while I’ve killed flies, fish, kittens, rabbits, mice, dogs, and goats in the line of duty, I’d rather not, thank you very much, and if I can study living animals without harming them, I’d rather do that. I’m sure I’ll eventually have to do some of the dirty wicked killing business with adult spiders, but I’ll put that off as long as I can.

Anyway, I think I exhausted her eventually, and she just wanted to curl up and hang off the end of a brush. I still couldn’t get her into the orientation I wanted.

My current plan: I’ve put her in a large vial, fed her some flies, and hope she spins a nice cobweb in there. Once she’s hanging from a nice strong web frame, I might be able to rotate the vial around and get a better shot of her.

We were making the rounds on our spider survey today, and came across many scenes like this. The egg sacs are opening and releasing clouds of adorable little babbies!

Mom is hanging out down below, gnawing on haunch of arthropod. Families! So precious!

I know, I said I probably wouldn’t do any spider posts today. It just goes to show you should never trust a guy who thinks like a spider. Anyway, we finished day 1 of the phase III spider survey early — I tell you, it’s a real joy when you’ve got a couple of well-trained students who know what they’re doing and can rip through a garage at lightning speed, identifying all the spiders lurking in shadowy corners. Preston and Maya got 10 houses done before 2:00! To celebrate, Mary and I decided to check out a couple of places right here in the little town of Morris where Argiope was rumored to reside, and we found her! Down by the railroad tracks, near the Cenex gas station on the south side of town, we found a couple of them.

I also had an ulterior motive for looking for them. We captured this one and carried it home, and I released it into a patch of native prairie plants that Mary had planted for local pollinators. It’s only fair to include local predators, as well. We’ll see if she survives and thrives and maybe spawns a local line of noble Argiope in my backyard.

Over on the iNaturalist site for Spiders of Minnesota, we’ve been tasked with finding Argiope. I hadn’t seen any in Minnesota before (and I’ve been living here for almost 20 years), but as usual, once you start looking, and once you see a few, suddenly their presence just leaps out at you. We found a bunch of them today!

These are among the biggest spiders in Minnesota, and the first one I found, the pictures weren’t so great. I’m used to itty-bitty little beasties, so I’ve got multiple extension tubes in my camera, and all I got were EXXXTREME closeups. Today I popped out most of those tubes. These guys really are monstrous huge, and vividly colored. Once I tweaked my camera, they were also easy to photograph.

We found them in the unmowed drainage ditches all along the highway through town. Well, honestly, Mary found them — she spotted the first, I moved in with the camera, totally focused on the specimen, and she had to yell at me that I was about to walk into another one. She was keying in on the stabilimenta, the thickened zig-zag bands that form a line in the webs, and once she spotted one, she was seeing them all over the place. It got to the point that she’d say “one here, one here, another one here” and point and I’d just go where she commanded.

I’ve put a little gallery below the fold. Get out into nature and open your eyes!

[Read more…]

I took care of some tedious maintenance work in the lab today — organizing the vials of spiders (lots of them!), double-checking their classification and sex and relabeling them. I color-coded them by species (white is Parasteatoda, green is Steatoda borealis, yellow is Steatoda triangulosa) and made pink and blue stickers for females and males, which tells you the degree of excitement at the lab bench!

But some fun stuff was going on. Remember Brienne, the hugely swollen female that we were sure was going to make an egg sac any day now, and she didn’t, and she kept getting bigger and bigger? She finally got off the pot and laid a big batch of eggs!

Here’s Brienne before:

Here’s Brienne now:

Finally! She hasn’t moved from that corner of her cage, but it’s got to be a relief to expel that load. The egg sac is bigger than she is!

Also, as I was sorting through the spiders, I saw that another egg sac had popped overnight. Here’s a contented female surrounded by her brood in one of our vials:

She’s a nameless P. tep, which seems callous now — we don’t give them names until we move them into the bigger cages, but they’re still quite capable of pumping out eggs in more cramped quarters. Maybe I’ll have to give her a newer, bigger home…and a name. Got any suggestions?

Getting away from the decaying, abandoned human homes for a bit, we acted on a tip from a colleague and visited Stahler prairie, a lovely spot of land near the university that was donated to us for research and teaching. I didn’t even know it existed until this morning! Those ecologists…always keeping secrets from us lab geeks. But now we know, and we went strolling through the grasses. That’s Mary, off in the distance.

We were disappointed at first — the place is buzzing with bugs, and we found quite a few large webs, but we didn’t see much of the resident spiders. Big empty webs meant there had to be a webspinner nearby, but these are cunning beasts and very good at hiding. We finally found one big Neoscona cozy deep down in a tube made of a furled leaf.

We’ll be back, Stahler Prairie! We’re figuring you out and we shall tease out your secrets!

One other thing we’ve noticed is that there are so many spider mamas out there. This is Pholcus manueli — they carry their egg sacs around with them.

This is a Parasteatoda we found in Hancock. They hover over the egg sac which is typically imbedded in their cobweb.