My student, Maya, found this pretty little stilt-legged cellar spider in her dorm. I need to share.
Their legs are so long I can’t fit the whole animal into the frame at the lowest magnification of my scope.
The cartoon is a lie. We’ve been to many playgrounds looking for spiders, and there is a consistent pattern. If you visit a neglected park, like Dogpoop Park that we visited yesterday, you’ll find lots of webs dangling everywhere under the equipment (whether the owner is at home at the time is a different question). Go to a park heavily trafficked in children, and the place is bare of spiders and their webs. I’m pretty sure children eat spiders and pretend cobwebs are cotton candy.
So this morning Mary and I visited Eastside Park, which is probably the most popular park in town. There are picnic tables everywhere, a large shelter, a band shell, and two playground areas with slides and swings and all that good stuff. One thing it doesn’t have is a lot of spiders.
I mean, seriously, what is the point?
We did have some success prowling about the band shell, which has complex siding with many crevices to hide in, and we found a few spiders cowering there. I think they’re terrified of carnivorous children. There were mainly Theridiidae lurking about, and curiously, they were uniformly Steatoda borealis, the Boreal Combfoot. They are pretty false widows. I like the mottled pattern on my friends, Parasteatoda, but the boreals are also nice, with solid dark black to reddish purple body and an elegant white band on the front of their abdomen.
So not a total waste of time. It would be a much more interesting hunting ground if we could get rid of the roving bands of kids. That park is full of pernicious children every time I pass by on a sunny day.
I slept in this morning until 6:30, which felt nice, but when I woke up, there was Mary — she’d been up for a few hours. She drank all the coffee. She was eager as a puppy to go on a spider walk. It was raining hard, with thunder, but that did not dissuade her. So I drank the cold dregs off the bottom of the coffee pot, and we went off to explore.
First stop was Kjenstad Park, over by Lake Crystal, where I hoped that the proximity to insects hatching out of the lake would fuel a massive spider population. No such luck. There were a few little guys like this one lurking in the playground equipment, but not much otherwise.
Most horribly, though, we discovered some of the neighbors are using the park to walk their dog(s), and it was a filthy, dirty, disgusting place, with the ground covered with dog poop. We are now privately calling the place Dogpoop Park, and would be willing to lobby the city council for an official name change, or for city officials to teach residents how to clean up after your goddamn dog.
Today, we got smart. We decided to do a spiderwalk in the cool of the morning, before the day turned into an oven for both humans and spiders, and we tried some new turf, the Stevens County Fairgrounds. The fair starts next week, and the fairgrounds sit empty all year long except for, I presume, regular maintenance, making the place an interesting combination of well-kept buildings that have been sitting abandoned and mostly neglected for almost a year, and it was a utopia for spiders. There were orb webs and cobwebs everywhere, and in case you’re wondering why, it’s because the air was practically a soup of mosquitos. The metal siding of every building, in this case the Dairy Barn, was swathed in webbing, and the webs were thickly clotted with mosquito corpses. I applaud their industry.
(By the way, hot tip for photographing spider webs: carry an atomizer of water with you, and spritz them so they pop out a bit more.)
Of course there were spiders there.
Mary was out doing her gardening this evening, and look who she found:
Neoscona, you think? First one I’ve seen.
Mary has got the bug. After our hot morning searching for spiders, I just wanted to kick back, take my shoes off, and cool down for a while. But nooooo…she had to drag me off to another local park to search for more. We visited Green River Park here in Morris, which has a lovely restroom that is thick with cobwebs (and also thick with squadrons of mosquitos waiting to lift off).
I charged into the men’s room, where I found this beautiful Steatoda borealis resting in a corner. I left her there, in case anyone wants to stop by and check her out.
As promised, we got out this morning to collect spiders. Our destination: West Side Park in Hancock, MN. We got a few. The prime hunting ground was a covered picnic area that had a metal frame with corrugated sheet metal walls that was great for the spiders, because they could hide in the spaces between the metal frame and the corrugated metal…unfortunately, it was bad for spider hunters, because they could hide a little too effectively.
Still, we managed to get a few more of our familiar friends, Parasteatoda:
What are you doing for fun this weekend? This morning, the students and I are going out on a collecting trip — we’re going to drive outside of our survey area and just go nuts, prowling around bushes and buildings and parks, looking for novel spider species we hadn’t seen before, and scooping up all the P. tep we encounter to fill up our colony. We’ve got ten healthy egg sacs maturing in the incubator and a swarm of spiderlings to care for, but I’m a little bit paranoid because Winter Is Coming and I know the current bounty of diversity is going to die off fast. I also want to avoid last winter’s problem of a) the male shortage, and b) excessive inbreeding.
Besides, spiders are neat-o, right?
A recommendation: the people who made iNaturalist, the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, have come out with a new app for your smartphone, Seek. It’s amazing. Point your phone camera at a tree, a leaf, an insect, anything, and it scans the live image and homes in on a species ID. It’s the most magical thing ever since my grad school days when I’d go for walks with Jim Kezer, an old-school herpetologist, who could give you the Latin binomial for any organism you showed him.
Try it, you’ll like it. It’s not quite as folksy and fun as Jim Kezer was, but it’s handy.
Anyway, we’re going to be out and about in the local small towns and parks, photographing and collecting spiders this morning. I hope your plans are as exciting.
Following the advice from previous comments, I tweaked my settings and reshot another of these little guys; I’m also revising my guess at who this is, because I’m told it’s probably from the genus Theridion.
Much nicer.
You know that batch of spiderlings I caught earlier? I had them in this container in my office, like so:
They’re all the little dots in there. Well, I decided I would set them free out in the garden, and I opened the container as you can see…while still in my office. They immediately became agitated and started scurrying about, and next thing I know, many of them have lifted off and started ballooning. I whipped out my camera and tried to get a photo, but tiny dots wafting through the air aren’t easy to photograph. Here’s a pair of them looking like spiders in space.
This is my favorite, though — it was drifting near the container, so it look like it’s about to land on Earth.
Most of them are outside now, but I’ve still got a few crawling on me, and every once in a while one floats across my field of vision. It’s magical!
