I saw this and had to stick my head in a grungy, stinky box to take this photo.

See it? There was a mama Parasteatoda tending her egg sac. Right there in the middle! You can’t miss it.

I scooped it up, and will be taking it into the lab. Maybe this is easier to see?

The spiders are laying eggs all over the place and tucking their sacs into odd corners all around the yard and the house. It’s like an easter egg hunt!

I didn’t tell you the whole story about our local Argiope. In fact, I cropped the photo I used by a lot — I left out that spider’s consort. Here’s the whole thing.

The female is on the right, that smaller, more gracile spider on the left is a male.

The thing about nephilid mating is that when the male gets lucky, one of the last things he does, once he gets his palp into the female epigyne, is to snap it off — that is, he voluntarily castrates himself and leaves the organ inside her. It acts as block to further mating by other males.

In addition, he builds a web very close to the female’s, and stations himself there to deter any males that might wander along and try courting her. That little guy in the left corner is a eunuch guard!

I know, that sounds creepy and stalkerish, and as I always tell people, the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy, so don’t take this as an example. Maybe Dolomedes is a more attractive role model: the males don’t do the eunuch guardian thing at all, they just up and die on the spot as soon as they achieve copulation, and leave their lifeless corpse dangling from the female’s nether bits until it falls off. Carrying around the dead body of former partner’s is an excellent way to get other males to leave you alone.

I don’t recommend that for human women, either. It would work, though!

On LiveScience:

On MSN:

On Philadelphia TV news:

These are all nonsense. Virtually all spiders are venomous, and the Joro spider does not have particularly strong venom and isn’t a hazard to humans. The “flying” bit is just a reference to the spiderlings’ dispersal method of using strands of silk to loft themselves into the air — the adults are much too large and heavy to do that.

At least NPR gets the story straight.

That is correct: harmless. Harmless to people, at least — there is concern that the Joro spider will displace other resident spider species.

But these are magnificent animals.

What’s also annoying to me is that we already have large orb-weaving spiders of similar size living in these same places that the Joro is invading. We have Argiope aurantia already.

These tend not to live in cities or places particularly close to people — they eat large insects, like grasshoppers. If your home is swarming with hoppers all over, then yes, maybe Argiope or Joro will set up shop in your neighborhood, and take out the grasshoppers. I’ve seen fallow fields around my home that are densely overgrown with grasses and where the grasshoppers are leaping all around you as you walk through the brush, and I’ll see Argiope spiders populating every square meter. They don’t get headlines, though, because they’re harmless and leave people alone.

Maybe I’ll have to record a video of one of these spectacularly dense Argiope sites this year — they usually start popping up in August, so you’ll have to wait a bit.

Finally! First egg sac of the season, along with its attentive mom, who didn’t want to be separated from it.

All of the black widows have been fed! Here’s Verðandi just as she delivered a fatal bite to a mealworm.

Once again, the background is the lid of the container, annoyingly. Black widows are not very dynamic pets, since they like to just sit in one place and wait for their prey, and they don’t do much and are mostly inactive. I guess when you’re that pretty you can afford to be so lazy.

My male black widow has found a cozy place. He’s snuggled down in a bed of moss, and he’s hard to spot if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I had to stick my camera lens way down into his hidey-hole, so even if you’re unfamiliar with Latrodectus, I suspect you’ll have no trouble finding him.

The black widows I adopted yesterday are taking their time to adjust. Here’s one of them:

Both of the females have scurried up to the highest point in their respective cages, and are roosting sullenly there, and are totally immobile this morning. I can tell they were active in the night because they’ve both constructed loose nests of silk, but are otherwise inactive today.

The male has disappeared from sight. I think he’s lurking in the moss.

You can tell how laid back these spiders are. I popped the lid off Urðr’s cage, flipped it upside down, and fussed about for several minutes trying to get a decent picture (that bright orange lid is not helping), and she didn’t so much as twitch. It was the perfect opportunity for a jailbreak, and she just quietly meditated.