We spent another day rummaging about in strangers’ garages, working up a dirty sweat and getting spider webs in our faces. It was great fun! We doubled the size of our data set, so that’s the big news.

The other fun thing is that while mostly the data is repetitive — most garages around here are full of Pholcidae or familiar ol’ Parasteatoda tepidariorum — it’s neat when find a different population. We’re seeing the same species of Theridiidae everywhere, but we walked into one shed today and it was different. Theridiidae, sure, this shed contained only Steatoda borealis. These guys, with many teeny tiny recent hatchlings:

We’re going back here in July to see if that population retains its grip.

I survived my first day of field work, although right now I’m feeling every square millimeter of my left trapezius muscle — all that stooping and stretching and poking exacerbated all my existing aches and pains. Also, it was hot, up around 30°C, which I think is the major limiting factor in how long we can keep it up. Did you know that most people don’t have air-conditioned garages? It’s true!

We surveyed half a dozen houses, which is what I hoped we could accomplish, so we’re right on track. I’m hoping to reach around 30 houses this week. There’s not much we can say from such a preliminary sample, but we have a couple of suggestive observations. The older the house, the more spiders. The most heavily populated garage had 37 active spiders on the walls, and 17 egg cases — we’re looking forward to seeing the population explosion there next month. The most sparsely populated had 1.

Almost all the spiders were either Pholcidae or Theridiidae, and curiously, their numbers were inversely correlated to one another. It could be a sign of a competitive interaction, or some subtle detail in the environment of these buildings that favors one over the other. Or it could just be our tiny sample size so far. We found only three spiders total that didn’t belong to those two families — I have to key them out this evening.

I also have to plug all the data into the computer, too. I’m practicing a little data security: there’s one key sheet with the addresses and a code, and then the data for each house is stored in paper files under that code, and also recorded in a database. I didn’t know if that would be necessary, but two people asked me if we’d keep the numbers confidential — I guess there’s some concern that one doesn’t want one’s home known as spider-infested. I would think that would increase the property value, but that’s just me.

Now I have to recover over night, and do it again tomorrow and the day after. Sunday shall be a day of rest, sort of. I’ve got about 30 spiders in the colony that will need some TLC that day.

Look at this beautiful beast! You’re missing out if you aren’t on our spider survey.

We’re getting close. This week I’m training some students (and myself) in spider classification, and then the week after we’re going to start charging into local residences to sample spider populations, with the goal of getting an estimate of the distribution of synanthropic species and making a baseline measurement of how their numbers change over the summer. So today I’m making signs that we’ll hang up around town to get volunteers.

I’ll be curious to see if my phone starts ringing madly or if I get nothing but silence — I don’t expect a lot of enthusiasm in the community for someone finding spiders in their homes, but maybe they’ll be curious. If I get no response, my backup plan is to show up in some neighborhoods and do some good old-fashioned door knocking.

This isn’t the only project I’ll have going this summer — we’re also going to do some laboratory work with developing P. tepidariorum. Anyway, I’m about to get busy.

Continuing the saga of our efforts to track down spiders…we’ve had some success.

[Read more…]

My wife and I are getting serious about this spider hunting business. We lit some torches and delved deep into our basement. I went as a dwarven fighter, she was an elven enchantress. It was terrifying.

You must understand that several years ago, when we still had teenagers at home, our basement was a hotspot for carousing. Many were the XBox battles waged in that space, the nights were full of shouts and gunfire and raucusness, and many Cheetos were consumed there. Then our offspring departed, and it fell silent and abandoned. We stripped out much of the furniture, removed carpeting, cleaned it all out, and it did fall into darkness and neglect. We braved the first level today.

The cobwebs are impressive and dense, and they were decorated with the shriveled corpses of many pholcids, and also the long-drained bodies of pill bugs, centipedes, and millipedes. We sought out any theridiidae, but they were absent. It was like a tomb.

Everything was covered thickly with webbing though, like the electrical system. Look closely, and you might see a pholcid embracing the grey box — it’s dead. I nudged it, it didn’t move (live pholcids will start gyrating in their webs if disturbed). One has to wonder what it is guarding.

I looked into the crawlspace. That was too awful to contemplate, too infested with webbing everywhere. No one has entered that cavern in decades, so we retreated. I think we’ll have to go up a few levels before we dare plunge into that nightmare.

We retreated further and turned the corner to escape when we saw…

[Read more…]

I went for my morning stroll this morning, checking out spider haunts. My garage is still destitute, with nothing but dead husks and cobwebs. I walked over to the science building, and checked a few places that I knew were crannies where cobwebs and insect parts and spider poop could usually be found — nothing! They were shiny clean! I guess our magnificent custodial staff had been scrubbing unusually thoroughly for commencement. I’ve still got my lab spiders looking sleek and plump, but they’re all female, and I’m desperate for male spider juice right now.

I consoled myself by making my final travel details to the American Arachnological Society meeting next month. I’ll get my spider fix one way or another.

Then I was reading a This American Life episode about spinelessness. It’s about the vertebrate bias in research publications and funding. Malcolm Rosenthal is deploring the fact that invertebrates are relatively neglected.

Our findings can be summarized in two major points:

First: The warm-blooded vertebrate skew was intense. Almost 85 percent of described species are arthropods, but more than 70 percent of publications were on vertebrates. Birds and mammals alone accounted for well over 50 percent of publications, despite representing less than 2 percent of all animal species.

Second: In a world where citations are used to measure impact, publishing on understudied systems comes at a cost to the researcher. Publications on vertebrates received more citations on average than arthropod papers. They were also far more likely to be “blockbuster” publications with more than 100 citations.

He’s right. You can’t deny that there is a strong bias at work. Back in the early days of zebrafish work, we often made the argument that these are honorary invertebrates when we were talking to other developmental biologists, because they do have a lot of the advantages of model systems in that group, but in our grant proposals we turned around and emphasized that these were true vertebrates, and that they had the virtues of relevance to research in human health and disease. We did our best to straddle that line.

And while Rosenthal’s evidence is true, I think he’s missing the real distinction. This bias is a consequence of a fundamental difference between basic and applied research. Basic research is all the stuff he and I love, where we just care about how the world in all of its richness works. Applied research has a focus on science that helps us, the human species, and because we’re such selfish assholes, that’s where the lion’s share of the moolah goes. Look at the names of the big funding agencies: the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute. That’s where you apply if you want to make a case for research that contributes to our understanding of human health and disease. You can apply for research grants to study, for instance, zebrafish, or even insects, but you’re going to have to link it with some relevance to Homo sapiens.

You want to study some other organism, because it is interesting in and of itself, and might tell you something fundamental about biology? You apply to the National Science Foundation.

The budget for NIH is $37 billion. The budget for NSF is $7.8 billion. Enough said. Even if you convince the agency to fund your research on some fascinating, little known organism, some jerk in the legislature is going to proxmire you and whine about wasting money on bugs. If you avoid the spotlight, you’re still going to that family reunion this summer where Uncle Dork is going to sneer at you and wonder what the hell you do for a living.

I agree that there should be more support for more diversity in topics in science, and I really want to see more support for basic science, but that’s going to require a huge shift in science priorities. I’m all for a National Spider Institute that is well-funded by congress, though.