They’re all lovely! Every one!

I should let you know about this article, The ultimate lovely legs competition: the world’s nine most beautiful spiders, although I’m not too thrilled with the premise. It’s not a competition, all spiders have lovely legs…and chelicerae and eyes and abdomens and cephalothoraxes.

(I didn’t include any photos in this post because I’ve learned that some of you get so overwhelmed by the beauty that you close your eyes or close the browser window and go have a nice lie-down, and I didn’t want to disturb your work flow.)

Good Morning Spider!

It’s Thursday, which means it’s my spider clean up day — feeding and removing withered dead corpses from their vials, and also bottle-washing and general tidying up.

I’ve also been working on compiling some resources for students, since in a few months I have to sit down with a few of them and teach them how to identify spiders (challenging, since I’m a novice myself). For everyone’s general edification, here’s a short list of websites with taxonomic information:

Of course I also have a couple of printed field guides. I’m eager for the spring thaw and an opportunity to go chase spiders.

“A surprising amount of death of small vertebrates in the Amazon is likely due to arthropods such as big spiders and centipedes.”

See? This is why we don’t invite mygalomorphs and scolopendrids to any of our parties. They tend to eviscerate and decapitate and consume innocent visitors and splatter fluids all over everything. The Araneomorphae are much tidier, wrapping up their victims in silk and then neatly puncturing them and sucking out their guts. It’s the difference between an axe murderer and the gangster who lays down plastic before executing his enemy. Who would you rather have at a social event?

Did you expect brand loyalty from a spider?

No one is surprised, instead all the arachnologists are thinking “Cool!” Scientists in the Amazon captured a video of a mygalomorph spider chowing down on a young mammal. Mygalomorphs (tarantulas, funnel web spiders, trap door spiders) are big arthropods that will kill and eat anything about their size that they can ambush, so they’ll eat other arthropods, small birds, reptiles, and yes, mammals.

Now to print a few of these out and post them around the science building…

It’s hard to recruit students for research projects when you’re off on sabbatical. I’ve got one lined up so far, but I have ambitious plans for the summer and would like to get one or two more, so I’ve put together a recruitment poster.

Maybe I should have used a scientifically accurate close-up of a spider face instead of something bright and cartoony, but I have to get them into the lab first. Then they’ll learn to love our new arachnid reality.

I’d try it

My wife just interrupted me and told me I had to go to the store for various items. Very well then; I also have to throw dinner together, so maybe I’ll get a special treat or two.

The recipe looks fairly straightforward, although they don’t list the ingredients. It looks like green onion, garlic, peppers, cooking oil — I’ve got all that already — oh, is that Haplopelma? I’m fresh out. I wonder if they have any in stock in a small rural midwestern grocery store, or if I’m going to have to go to Cambodia to pick up some?

I’ll probably have to fix something else for Mary’s dinner, since I don’t think I can zip to Phnom Penh and back in time for my other evening plans (gonna check out Alita: Battle Angel at the Morris Theater). It’s too bad, I’d really like to try that sometime.

I should have cited Ed Yong

I just submitted a proposal on Monday for in-house funding for student research this summer and next year, specifically to assemble a Spider Squad to do a local survey of spider taxa and numbers. I cited the Sanchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys article as evidence that there are grounds for concern about declines in arthropod numbers, and argued that spiders are a good proxy for insect populations, because they’d also give us a perspective on those non-charismatic insects, not just butterflies and bumblebees, that form their food supply.

I just this morning got around to reading Ed Yong’s summary of the Insect Apocalypse, and I agree completely. The review suggests that it’s all bad news, that we should be concerned, and that we should be studying this more thoroughly, but that the panic over insect armageddon is grossly over-inflated. Nothing is going to make insects go extinct, short of a planet-sterilizing impact with a world-killing asteroid.

The Sanchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys review is fine, it’s real data, but it’s not necessarily representative. So what do we need to do? Fund more science!

She and others hope that this newfound attention will finally persuade funding agencies to support the kind of research that has been sorely lacking—systematic, long-term, widespread censuses of all the major insect groups. “Now more than ever, we should be trying to collect baseline data,” Ware says. “That would allow us to see patterns if there really are any, and make better predictions.” Zaspel would also love to see more support for natural-history museums: The specimens pinned within their drawers can provide irreplaceable information about historical populations, but digitizing that information is expensive and laborious.

“We should get serious about figuring out how bad the situation really is,” Trautwein says. “This should be a huge wake-up call, and we should get on the ball instead of quibbling.”

What a coincidence — that’s what I said in my proposal. We need to collect baseline data, which is what I aim to do in this first year. And then, of course (hint, hint) I should get funding to keep collecting data for years. We’ll be covered with spiders!

Spider silk

It’s awesome stuff, as this video explains.

Also recommended if you want to learn more: this book, Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating. There’s so much coolness in spider biology, I’m tempted to offer an elective in the subject…except that I think it might be too narrowly focused for our curriculum, and about half the students would refuse to go anywhere near it.