Gardens are savage, brutal places

Mary is almost as into the spider thing as I am, but while I’m specializing in dirty dark cobwebby garages, she’s cultivating a garden and letting me know when she spots the arachnid denizens of bright sunny spaces. So she tells me she’s spotted a pair of spiders on the pea plants, and she thought they might be mating. I toddled out with my camera to see what the fuss was about, and here’s the wee little yellow critter ambling about on a leaf. I’m going to say it’s a tetragnathid.

It kept going back to the other spider, but I couldn’t get a good look at its partner. I tried to get it a good angle.

Then, when I finally do get a good shot at what it has down there…oops. Definitely not mating. It’s killing and eating the other spider, which I still can’t identify, in part because it’s trussed up and getting gnawed on.

Should I be worried that my wife can’t tell the difference between making love and being murderized?

Hey baby baby baby

Finally, our colony is producing again! Lyanna has made an egg case, and she’s tending to it in a maternal way.

Excuse the quality of the picture — I tried to photograph her without disturbing her at all. The bold red and white is just the outside of the Coca Cola box we used to make a cardboard frame.

Also pending are Daenerys, Gilly, and Cersei who have gigantic bellies right now and look like they’re ripe to start pumping out eggs for us.

Portal to the void

We kind of wrapped our July spider survey today — there are a few homes on our list where the owners were absent, and we’re a bit reluctant to barge into people’s garages without permission. We might check into a few of those tomorrow, but otherwise, it’s time for me to sit down and enter all this data into the computer.

Just for fun, I wandered about the science building taking a few photos. Here, for instance is a lovely funnel web I found in a corner of one window, on the outside. There was also a large dark body lurking deep in the funnel, but dang, macro photography has problems with depth of field.

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Spider population explosion!

The numbers don’t lie: the results in progress say the spider population has been surging since June (which is, well, not unexpected and won’t get us published in Nature). I’ll be curious to see if it continues to rise in August, and since we’re seeing a fair number of spiderlings everywhere, I expect it will.

We’re already talking about extending the study a couple more months, at least until the first snow, so we can catch the expected decline. The only problem with that is that we can’t do the intensive survey in September and October that we can in July, since I’ll be back to work teaching, and the students will be back to work learning. Maybe we can do a representative subset, though.

Also, I don’t think my bones can handle simultaneously teaching and doing field work. I’m pretty much worn out already, and am getting up in the morning to take prophylactic NSAIDs to keep going. The exercise is good for me, right?

Spiders are tiring me out

It’s been a long day — I’ve decided we can survey 8 sites per day, so we did, in the heat and the dirt, with constant drizzly rain, and by golly, we’ll do it again tomorrow. I look forward to the big pile of data I’ll have at the end of the week, and a nap.

Also, I think I’ve downed a couple of liters of iced tea since I got home.

Spider news!

Wring me out, I’m done. We’re back into the field work this week, and I’m glad we’re doing only 3 one-week sessions this summer. We visited half a dozen sites today, and while most of them were around 30°C, there were a few that were toasty hot and 35°, and they were dusty and cobwebby, too. It was more exhausting than I expected.

The good news, though, is that I’ve recruited an additional student, and it makes a big difference — we can rip through a garage almost twice as fast as before. We set a goal of 6 houses today, and finished by 3:00, so we’re going to line up 8-10 tomorrow. So far, my unsurprising hypothesis is holding up: we’re finding significantly more spiders during these hot midsummer days.

Mondays are also feeding days, so we did a little lab work on top of everything else. We set up a couple new cages, and also introduced a half-dozen new males to the more lonely females. The students got to watch a mating, and some vigorous dining, and Maya has set up a new cage for a different species, Tegeneria.

Everything is cruising along fine and dandy, except for the fact that I’m a sweaty tired mess when I get home. Also, I haven’t quite recovered from my 4-day weekend at Convergence. Productivity is its own reward, though, right?

Respect the spider, don’t fear it

This is a lovely video of a man handling a black widow spider. Really, they aren’t interested in biting you, anymore than you would care to sink your teeth into a mountainside you’re climbing over. You do have to be gentle, though.

I’ve had spiders crawling on me in the lab, and my advice to students is simple: don’t panic, lead them to where you want them to go, and they’ll do you no harm.

The Spider Times

This is my usual weekly mailing to students who expressed an interest in spider research.

Good morning, spider-team. Here’s this week’s mission.

1. Monday at noon is feeding time! Last week we started giving them crickets, in addition to wingless fruit flies, and they gobbled them up. We’re trying to fatten up the ladies to get them to start laying eggs, and I think they’re close — I’m hoping to see egg sacs in their spacious new cages soon.

2. We have some babies! A Steatoda triangulosa that we caught over two weeks ago was already pregnant, and laid a fluffy white egg sac for us. It hatched out over the weekend, and we’ve got a small brood of baby spiderlings (see below). We’ll be separating these out into small vials today. This isn’t the species I’d planned on working on, but this will be good practice for future Parasteatoda tepidariorum spiderlings.

3. There will be another spider-feeding on Thursday at noon. They are quite avid little killing machines.

4. Also on Thursday afternoon, I depart for Minneapolis and Convergence, where I’ll be sitting on a couple of science panels. I’ll be away all weekend.

5. Next week, beginning on the 8th, Phase II of our Stevens County Spider Survey begins. We have an ever-growing list of sites to screen, and I’m also adding a few additional steps to our protocol, so all volunteers will be appreciated. We’ll be going out every day, starting at around 10, for the entire week.

6. My offer to take you out for a night at the movies still stands. I’ll be at the Morris Theater at 7pm on Wednesday for Spider-Man: Far From Home. Let me know if you’re interested — we can also pick apart the science afterwards.