Word on the street in these here parts is that you should ignore the warmth and the sunshine and wake up to the fact that the weather is going to change. Spiders are smarter than humans that way.

Seriously…so many egg sacs are appearing all over the place. I think the spiders are instinctively preparing for the catastrophe that is a Minnesota winter, and also responding to the bumper crop of mosquitos and other insects that are swarming everywhere right now.

The students and I have plans for this week.

• Tomorrow, we’re going to take advantage of the plethora of egg cases to do a staging exercise, opening them up and assessing the developmental stage of the embryos, referring to this paper: Mittman,B and Wolff, C (2012) Embryonic development and staging of the cobweb spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum C. L. Koch, 1841 (syn.: Achaearanea tepidariorum; Araneomorphae; Theridiidae). Dev Genes Evol (2012) 222:189–216. It’ll be great fun.
• Thursday is Feeding Day. At 10:00 we’ll feed the adults crickets and flies, and all the babies will get a fly of their own. This is becoming a bigger job every week.
• Friday…COLLECTING TRIP. We’re going to cruise out to some of the local towns, outside of where we’re doing our spider survey, and we’re going to go wild filling vials with Parasteatoda and their egg cases, because I’m having my own anxiety about winter, when I’ll lose access to the wild population again. My goal is to have so many spiders that they’re dribbling out of my ears. We especially need more males.

This is a different spider from the colony, but the photo just managed to capture a bit of the 3-D intricacy of the cobwebs they build in the frames.

Here’s the proud papa of that egg sac.

By the way, he’s cohabiting with his partner with no conflicts at all. She hasn’t tried to eat him even once.

It was a long day in the lab — I had to catch up with washing glassware, a disgusting job since the main chore was all the fly bottles. There was a reward, however. I’ve been waiting for the colony to take off, and finally, they’re just pumping out spider eggs. We counted nine egg sacs at various stages of development today. Here’s one proud mama with her gigantic egg sac. Yes, all that came out of little ol’ her. She’s looking a bit deflated since this weekend.

In case you’re wondering what you’re looking at, we cut up cardboard boxes that contained mini-cans of pop, which turn out to be just the right size for our sterilyte containers. We cut out the center of the boxes, leaving just the edges and corners, which makes for a nice frame for them to spin cobwebs on. The big advantage is that we can pick up the whole cardboard frame, carrying along the spider and her web undisturbed, and rotate it around to find where she was hiding. In this case, she’s snugged up in one corner of the light cardboard box with an egg sac that is, I swear, twice her size.

If you compare this photo to yesterdays, you can see that yesterday the embryos were in the process of molting, with the prosoma free and the abdomen and legs still trapped in the old cuticle. Today the legs are free and the old cuticle is a shriveled white mass at the end of the abdomen.

We have lots of healthy looking babies from this clutch, which worries me…we’ve got three more egg cases that will probably hatch out this week, and we’re going to be swimming in baby spiders. I’m going to need a lot more flies, I think.

Here’s a closer look at its cute l’il baby face.

There was some concern about a clutch of embryos that I accidentally removed from the egg sac prematurely. I was worried that they wouldn’t develop properly. Well, concerns allayed. They’re busy making legs just fine.

One catch, though, that I discovered to my horror. There’s a reason for that protective silk egg sac: at this age they’re just a delicate membrane over a ball of fluids, and they rupture at the slightest touch. I’m going to have to leave them alone until they’re tough enough to walk about on their own.

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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