I’m back! I have to say that, after drinking margaritas with Iris, the next best part was the spider tour, and in particular this one place, the Thompson Hill Information Center and Rest Area, which was magical.

I had a good feeling when I saw all the plants growing up right next to the building, and I was right. I went to the left behind the shrubbery and there in the corner, I saw this:

All those dark dots running down the center? Spiders. All Parasteatoda. I counted 9 in just this one little strip, and there were more and more all around the building, and then there were multiple picnic shelters that were home to many more. It was a spider bonanza!

Want to see a few? Look below the fold.

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I’ve been making a pest of myself on iNaturalist the past few months, throwing in photographs of spiders with my wild, poorly-informed guesses about their identity (I’m a total newb in this business, just an enthusiastic newb), and someone took pity on me and recommended another field guide I can use, specific to this region. It’s Spiders of the North Woods by Larry Weber, and I ordered it on the spot. Yay! I look forward to being slightly less annoying to the real arachnologists!

It won’t be here until Monday, though, and today we’re driving from Duluth back to Morris, and I’ll keep on poking my face into spider webs on the way.

Today was a glorious day for a road trip from Morris to Duluth. I told Mary that we should take it slow and easy.

“It’ll be a relaxing, low pressure trip,” I said.

“We’ll make frequent stops,” I said.

“We’ll stop now and then and go for walks to stretch our legs,” I said.

“It’ll be fun!” I said.

“We’ll look for spiders,” I quietly said.

And we did. The first half of the drive was a little disappointing, because it was unpleasantly hot, and spiders are wise and lay their trappy little webs and retire to the coolth under an overhang or in a small crack. We saw spider sign, but not much else. The one exception was this subtle little lady who was quietly lurking under a handrail with her babies at the Big Spunk rest area.

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Mary keeps finding spiders for me, and she brought me this lovely Parasteatoda this afternoon. She was remarkably active and was just skittering around in the vial, and she was so plump and pretty and vivacious that I had to give her a bigger cage of her own in the lab, and within seconds of being placed on the frame she was building a big new web — you can see a bit of it stretched between her toes.

I named her Shae. The colony is getting quite large now.

Yesterday, I showed you that clutch of spider eggs I’d accidentally removed from their silken egg sac. This morning I checked on them, looked into the incubator, and saw they were still resting there in a tight little ball, but when I picked up the vial, they disappeared. The coherent ball of eggs fell apart, and all the individuals went tumbling down, like little beige pearly ball bearings, and they’re rolling around on the floor of their container.

I don’t consider this a good sign — it means that they initially had some adhesive properties and that they’re drying out. Mama Spider puts a drop of mystery fluid in the egg sac as she’s laying eggs, and it’s not clear what that does for them. These eggs may be doomed. I spritzed some water vapor into the vial and also dampened the foam plug to get the humidity up, but we’ll see. I’ll be keeping an eye on them.

P.S. They’re not like chicken eggs, where a fall from 20 egg diameters up is going to crack them all. There are some privileges to being tiny.

Beautiful.

We’re currently cultivating 3 spider egg cases in the lab, with several more imminent, we think. This morning, I separated them from their mommies so I could put them in a temperature controlled incubator. I was delicate about it — not actually touching the sac itself, but tugging on the strands of silk holding them onto the web, and transferring them to clean vials. This one was a miracle, because without even trying I had accidentally and neatly removed the silken wrappings of the case. I don’t know if this is good or bad, since it might affect their development, but I guess we’ll find out.

These eggs were laid two days ago. Now we just watch them to see what happens next.

Also, don’t tell anyone else, but despite our care in maintaining all spiders in vials with a foam plug, or a larger container with closed lids, somehow babies are escaping, and we keep finding bits of the lab covered in webbing. Today it was the door to the incubator and the timed light. We caught the culprit for that — it was a tiny theridiidid spiderling who had built an elaborate web. We fed him as a reward.

I’m still hoping to walk in one day and find the entire lab cocooned in spider silk. My colleagues are probably not as eager as I am.

Today I’ve been prowling around, acting suspicious around my house, still trying to work out this macrophotography thing. I just now found a lovely Parasteatoda doing her business in a nook on the side of my house, so I had to snap a picture. My house has rather orange siding, which accounts for the warm tones of the background.

I caught her in the act of wrapping up her prey. The flies are everywhere today…eat more, ma’am. Many more.

Then I noticed in a little cranny another treasure — she has an egg sac nearby. Sorry to say, I’m going to steal it. More embryos for the development lab!

Mary is almost as into the spider thing as I am, but while I’m specializing in dirty dark cobwebby garages, she’s cultivating a garden and letting me know when she spots the arachnid denizens of bright sunny spaces. So she tells me she’s spotted a pair of spiders on the pea plants, and she thought they might be mating. I toddled out with my camera to see what the fuss was about, and here’s the wee little yellow critter ambling about on a leaf. I’m going to say it’s a tetragnathid.

It kept going back to the other spider, but I couldn’t get a good look at its partner. I tried to get it a good angle.

Then, when I finally do get a good shot at what it has down there…oops. Definitely not mating. It’s killing and eating the other spider, which I still can’t identify, in part because it’s trussed up and getting gnawed on.

Should I be worried that my wife can’t tell the difference between making love and being murderized?

Finally, our colony is producing again! Lyanna has made an egg case, and she’s tending to it in a maternal way.

Excuse the quality of the picture — I tried to photograph her without disturbing her at all. The bold red and white is just the outside of the Coca Cola box we used to make a cardboard frame.

Also pending are Daenerys, Gilly, and Cersei who have gigantic bellies right now and look like they’re ripe to start pumping out eggs for us.