It takes a while to escape the gravitational pull of Morris, Minnesota, so we’re about to leave for the Twin Cities so I can catch an early morning flight to exotic Lexington, VA for the American Arachnological Society 2019 meeting. It feels a bit strange. There’s some imposter syndrome going on in my head, only I really am an imposter — I just started exploring arachnology this year, so I’m nothing but a novice.

I’m going to pretend I’m a bewildered and confused and uncertain first-year graduate student at this meeting. Just ignore the wrinkles and the grey beard, OK?

I’m also excited to get my first spider meeting t-shirt.

I may be becoming notorious in Morris. Since we got mentioned in the local paper, I’ve gotten a few phone calls from community members asking about spiders. The latest was an excited call that a swarm of baby spiders had hatched out on their screen door…so of course we had to leap into the Spider-Mobile and race across town. I suggested to Mary that we ought to get a giant fiberglass spider mounted on the roof and one of those magnetic sirens/flashing lights that I could attach on the roof for these moments when I get emergency Spider-Alerts.

Anyway, we got there, and they were adorable. Hundreds of baby spiderlings stretching their limbs on the door.

We took a sample, but left most alone. We took a few photos and then turned them loose on a bush outside my office window. I don’t mind seeding my yard with orb weavers.

We spent the afternoon largely engaged in moving our Parasteatoda females into larger, roomier quarters, using 5.7L Sterilyte containers, and then cutting up cardboard boxes to make frames inside the containers for them to build on. We discovered that the 10-can mini-can pop cases were exactly the right size to fit inside, so we zipped over to the grocery store and purchased way too many cases, just so we could get the cardboard. I bought most of it for my research student, who requested Mountain Dew — he’s sharing the bounty with his roommates, so it will be all my fault if a swarm of college students wired on caffeine rampage through the town tonight.

Yesterday, Mary and I went to Pomme de Terre Park, and has been our custom, prowled around looking for spiders. We found a magnificent Larinioides living in a tin shed down by the river, and caught it and brought it home. Look at it! It’s huge and beautiful!
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I got some excellent suggestions from Nicholas DiRienzo for raising spiders, which is why it’s good to get information online, and also why I’m going to the American Arachnology Society conference this weekend. You can get started with reading stuff, but there’s no substitute for hearing it straight from the experts.

We checked out the couples we’d put together in larger spaces yesterday, and sadly, I caught one in the act of cannibalism…poor guy. We separated them. Then I rummaged in my collection of zebrafish containers, and found some 5.7L Sterilyte containers, a bit smaller than Dr DiRienzo recommended, but we’ll give them a try. We moved a few females into them right away so they can start getting used to the expanded digs. We’re going to also add some cardboard liners, once we find a box that fits.

I was initially daunted about the space required — it was appealing to just have oodles of spiders in a small incubator — but once I started stacking these things, I realized I could pack maybe as many as 50 females into the space I’d previously used for my zebrafish setup. Sorry, fishies, it’s now an arachnid facility.

My summer student, Preston Fifarek, has wisely chosen to name the female spiders after characters from Game of Thrones. Males are going to get Lord of the Rings names. I’ll be interested to see how well Cersei takes to Bilbo.

I have plans, so many plans.

First, I’m going into the lab to examine yesterday’s handiwork. We attempted to breed two pairs of spiders yesterday, moving them into two different kinds of larger chambers. My concern is that the vials we keep them in are too small for two spiders and that one of the reasons I’m seeing so much cannibalism of the males is because of overcrowding. If all goes well, I’ll find two females and two live males today. If that works, I’m going to turn my incubator into a fornucopia and pair up all the males with mates. I’d like, for a change, to have more embryos than I know what to do with.

Then we’re surveying some more garages. I’ve arbitrarily set a one week window for data collection in June, so that will be done tomorrow.

This afternoon I have to transcribe all the data into my computer — right now I’ve got a pile of folders and scribblings on paper for each site. I’m keeping paper records of everything (hey, election officials — it’s a good idea!), but I’ve got to get it organized in one place so I can wrap my head around it.

One of the things I have to sort out is some of the bigger picture data. I’m being scrupulous about data privacy — every site is encoded on a master list, and then the individual site data is stored without direct reference to the homeowners (which is good, I planned ahead thinking people might not want it known how many spiders occupy their property), but now I’m seeing glimmerings of interesting spatial distributions of species. I might want to make a map at some point.

In some ways, the data so far is kind of boring. Because we restricted ourselves to one narrow kind of environment, garages and sheds, we’re seeing the same beasties everywhere: Pholcus and Steatoda and Parasteatoda. That’s good for our sanity, because we’re brand new at this spider game, so reducing the number of taxa we have to master simplifies everything. We know, though, that there are hundreds of species around here, and we only occasionally see an orb weaver or funnel web spider or ground spider in these dusty musty cobwebby garages. We might want to think about sampling other sites in the future.

For instance, houses around Lake Crystal here in town have been stunning when we walk up to knock on the front door — the houses are covered in webs, there are swarms of mosquitos and mayflies everywhere, we start out convinced that this place is going to a time-consuming nightmare to sort out. Then we walk into the garage, and dang, it’s nothing but Theridiidae and Pholcidae again, and not particularly rich in them, either. We’re focused on these sheltered mini-environments while there’s a riot going on outside. Maybe at some point, if I get a student interested in that sort of thing, we’ll just stake out an area on the lakeshore and go centimeter by centimeter through that more complex space.

Right now, though, just the relationships between these few species in our limited environment are going to take a while to puzzle out. Garages are either infested with Pholcus or Parasteatoda, but mixed distributions are less common. Will we see shifts over the summer? Do the pholcids, known predators of other spiders, gradually take over? Is there something in the environment that favors one species over another?

We’re also seeing some interesting granularity in the species distribution, which is one reason I’m thinking of mapping. We find Parasteatoda tepidariorum everywhere, it’s probably the most common spider in these sites. But then we found one house that was all S. triangularis, and two widely separated houses with lots of S. borealis. Just chance? Are there little enclaves of these species, like ethnic neighborhoods, that persist over time? If we go door-knocking and check other houses in these neighborhoods, will we find larger patterns?

I haven’t even started on the lab studies. Once we get steady production of embryos, we’re going to start with some simple studies of the effect of temperature on rate of development, seeing if we can induce diapause, that sort of thing, all with the aim of figuring out how spiders survive living in a place where temperatures drop to -20°C every winter. My summer months are split with one week of taxonomic studies to three weeks in the lab, so that’s actually going to take up more of our time soon.

I feel like I’m getting sucked down into a spider hole. It’s delightful! I recommend it! You should all join us down here!

We were out spider-huntin’ again today, adding more data to the collection, and finding this Steatoda, which is about as big as they get. We’ve captured a couple of representatives of this species now, but they’re all female.

We limit the number we capture to one or two a day, because we don’t want to perturb the local populations too much. I’m only planning to breed Parasteatoda tepidariorum, though, so I’m going to have to do something with the other species we find…I’m probably going to release them all at my house, since I did so much collecting here that the population is hopelessly messed up already, which may turn my house into a weird little hotbed of exotic spider diversity.

I wonder if that will increase the property value? It should.

Today was lab cleanup and organization day. I had the spider colony line up for their class photo.

You can see it’s still a small group — we’re just beginning to rebound from a long, quiet, male-less winter. I’m hoping to expand the colony to four or five times that size in the next few weeks, which I think will be sustainably self-perpetuating at that point.

To that end, those few males in the group are getting a little nervous — tomorrow is their wedding day. The lucky ladies are licking their chops. I’m hoping to minimize the likelihood of patriarchal mortality by transferring pairs to large, roomy honeymoon containers where the guys have a chance of running away.

This is my life right now: running around town, barging into people’s garages, peering into musty corners with my headgear, scooping up the occasional spider. Sorry. I’m going to be even more boring than usual for a while.

Today we surveyed a few more houses, including one that had no visible spiders at all — we found a few cobwebs, so we knew they were hiding somewhere in there, but no one was coming out to play. We were disappointed. The homeowners seemed pleased.

We also found one garage with multiple orb weavers, all very tiny and very young. This isn’t the usual place we expect to find orb webs.

Also found: Steatoda triangularis, with their pretty black & white diamond pattern.

Tomorrow I’m doing lab work, then a few more days of field work before we stop for the month, and then next weekend I’m off to the American Arachnological Society meeting to hang out with some real arachnologists. Am I immersed in spiderology nowadays? I think so.