I’m new to this arachnology business, so when I find an unfamiliar species, beyond the ones I encounter all the time in familiar habitats, I get completely lost. This one, for instance, is very pretty, and I looked at the shape of the abdomen and said “Theridiidae?”, but then I saw the lack of stripes at the limb joints and the very striking white markings, and I switched to “Idunno?”.
I’m going to have to plug away at this for years before I acquire a clue. It’s intimidating.
For our spiderwalk this morning, Mary and I strolled down the street to the Morris Area Elementary School. I had low expectations because, well, children. Those expectations were confirmed. Very few spiders were observed, and we had to squirm into awkward places to find most of them.
One confounding variable is that MAES is a relatively new building built of brick. To a spider, those vast featureless walls are a barren desert with few places to get shelter. Window frames were better; we saw lots of spider webs, but they were mostly frail, fragile things, as if someone had recently scrubbed the place. The only spiders we saw were on the outside of a couple of metal sheds that had been put up, apparently to support some recent construction going on.
What few spiders we did find were Steatoda borealis, which is interesting. Most of our survey work has been on the interiors of sheds and garages, which are dominated by Parasteatoda and Pholcus, while when I scan external surfaces, I’m finding many more S. borealis. They’re somewhat larger (although not today — everyone was on the small side, perhaps because the children have been harvesting the meatiest specimens) and maybe hardier. We’ll keep looking.
I’m about to be overwhelmed with a lab full of spiders. Two egg sacs erupted with over 100 emergent spiderlings this weekend, and I’ve got maybe eight more ready to pop.
Any baby sitters out there willing to take care of maybe a thousand baby spiders?
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:
