This is Monica.

Monica is Steatoda borealis, and she’s huge. She’s twice the size of our Parasteatoda, and looks simply immense after working with our familiar little guys. She’s big even for S. borealis.

I gave her away to another home earlier this summer. A student was looking for a pet spider, and had a nice terrarium setup, and was going to feed her crickets, so it was safe. She showed up at my door today with Monica, and asked, “Is that an egg sac?”

Sure is. Then she said, “I’m not ready to take care of a family,” a very responsible attitude to have, “would you take her back?” And of course I would. So I brought her back to the lab, and set her up in a nice spacious cage, and fed her lots of flies. I pulled out the egg sac and put it in a Petri dish, and that’s when I notice all the little black dots scurrying around in her old jar. This wasn’t Monica’s first go-round. She’d laid an earlier egg sac, unnoticed, which had hatched out probably last week, and laid a second sac, which we’d finally noticed. Here’s one of the many S. borealis babies.

So now I’ve got hundreds of P. tepidariorum babies, a half dozen S. triangulosa babies, and on top of that I’ve just added what looks like 40 or so S. borealis juveniles, and a clutch of S. borealis eggs to nurse. All of these have appeared at my lab door in the last two weeks. Hey, it’s nice, but did they all have to appear at once?

In the early morning, we go on long spiderwalks looking for wild spiders. In the late morning I go in the lab to look for new spider egg sacs. In the afternoon I sort and tend to spiders. I’m going to have to think of a good spider-themed activity for my evenings.

Oh, yeah, I read papers about spiders.

Anyway, today I can report that a third egg sac is now leaking baby spiders. They are totally cute.

However, in less happy news, the Ministry of Reproduction finds it necessary to report Brienne for willful slacking of her responsibilities. We have been giving Brienne special privileges — the warmest part of the stack of spider cages, lots of food, and we’ve just been expectantly watching her for the last week. Brienne has gotten huge — just look at that swollen abdomen.

Yet she refuses to produce an egg sac, simply sitting in the same spot all the time, growing larger. Well, the Forced Birth Committee of the Ministry is having none of that. We expect her to do her duty and produce a massive quantity of eggs in short order, or we’ll have to move her into a small vial and give her voluminous cage to a more fertile female.

Or maybe we’ll have to give her a new consort. Is she just holding out for a hunkier male?

I’m new to this arachnology business, so when I find an unfamiliar species, beyond the ones I encounter all the time in familiar habitats, I get completely lost. This one, for instance, is very pretty, and I looked at the shape of the abdomen and said “Theridiidae?”, but then I saw the lack of stripes at the limb joints and the very striking white markings, and I switched to “Idunno?”.

I’m going to have to plug away at this for years before I acquire a clue. It’s intimidating.

For our spiderwalk this morning, Mary and I strolled down the street to the Morris Area Elementary School. I had low expectations because, well, children. Those expectations were confirmed. Very few spiders were observed, and we had to squirm into awkward places to find most of them.

One confounding variable is that MAES is a relatively new building built of brick. To a spider, those vast featureless walls are a barren desert with few places to get shelter. Window frames were better; we saw lots of spider webs, but they were mostly frail, fragile things, as if someone had recently scrubbed the place. The only spiders we saw were on the outside of a couple of metal sheds that had been put up, apparently to support some recent construction going on.

What few spiders we did find were Steatoda borealis, which is interesting. Most of our survey work has been on the interiors of sheds and garages, which are dominated by Parasteatoda and Pholcus, while when I scan external surfaces, I’m finding many more S. borealis. They’re somewhat larger (although not today — everyone was on the small side, perhaps because the children have been harvesting the meatiest specimens) and maybe hardier. We’ll keep looking.

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My student, Maya, found this pretty little stilt-legged cellar spider in her dorm. I need to share.

Their legs are so long I can’t fit the whole animal into the frame at the lowest magnification of my scope.

The cartoon is a lie. We’ve been to many playgrounds looking for spiders, and there is a consistent pattern. If you visit a neglected park, like Dogpoop Park that we visited yesterday, you’ll find lots of webs dangling everywhere under the equipment (whether the owner is at home at the time is a different question). Go to a park heavily trafficked in children, and the place is bare of spiders and their webs. I’m pretty sure children eat spiders and pretend cobwebs are cotton candy.

So this morning Mary and I visited Eastside Park, which is probably the most popular park in town. There are picnic tables everywhere, a large shelter, a band shell, and two playground areas with slides and swings and all that good stuff. One thing it doesn’t have is a lot of spiders.

I mean, seriously, what is the point?

We did have some success prowling about the band shell, which has complex siding with many crevices to hide in, and we found a few spiders cowering there. I think they’re terrified of carnivorous children. There were mainly Theridiidae lurking about, and curiously, they were uniformly Steatoda borealis, the Boreal Combfoot. They are pretty false widows. I like the mottled pattern on my friends, Parasteatoda, but the boreals are also nice, with solid dark black to reddish purple body and an elegant white band on the front of their abdomen.

So not a total waste of time. It would be a much more interesting hunting ground if we could get rid of the roving bands of kids. That park is full of pernicious children every time I pass by on a sunny day.

I slept in this morning until 6:30, which felt nice, but when I woke up, there was Mary — she’d been up for a few hours. She drank all the coffee. She was eager as a puppy to go on a spider walk. It was raining hard, with thunder, but that did not dissuade her. So I drank the cold dregs off the bottom of the coffee pot, and we went off to explore.

First stop was Kjenstad Park, over by Lake Crystal, where I hoped that the proximity to insects hatching out of the lake would fuel a massive spider population. No such luck. There were a few little guys like this one lurking in the playground equipment, but not much otherwise.

Most horribly, though, we discovered some of the neighbors are using the park to walk their dog(s), and it was a filthy, dirty, disgusting place, with the ground covered with dog poop. We are now privately calling the place Dogpoop Park, and would be willing to lobby the city council for an official name change, or for city officials to teach residents how to clean up after your goddamn dog.

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Today, we got smart. We decided to do a spiderwalk in the cool of the morning, before the day turned into an oven for both humans and spiders, and we tried some new turf, the Stevens County Fairgrounds. The fair starts next week, and the fairgrounds sit empty all year long except for, I presume, regular maintenance, making the place an interesting combination of well-kept buildings that have been sitting abandoned and mostly neglected for almost a year, and it was a utopia for spiders. There were orb webs and cobwebs everywhere, and in case you’re wondering why, it’s because the air was practically a soup of mosquitos. The metal siding of every building, in this case the Dairy Barn, was swathed in webbing, and the webs were thickly clotted with mosquito corpses. I applaud their industry.

(By the way, hot tip for photographing spider webs: carry an atomizer of water with you, and spritz them so they pop out a bit more.)

Of course there were spiders there.

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Mary was out doing her gardening this evening, and look who she found:

Neoscona, you think? First one I’ve seen.