Yeah, sorry, arachnophobes! It’s day 6, everyone is looking good, so I’ve started trying to figure out how to sort out the tremendous number of spiders I now have in the lab. It looks like a few hundred babies, with 4 more egg sacs waiting in the wings to hatch out. I think I’m experiencing a population explosion.
My spiders at day 5 don’t look that much different than they did at day 4 — it’s all incremental growth at this point — but one very noticeable feature is the way they’ve built a dense mat of cobwebs throughout their petri dish. They’ve put a lot of energy in constructing their niche.
Just another of my daily updates. They grow up so fast!
Not shown here is that I have 3 other sets of hatchlings that are eating fruit flies as fast as I can make them — I’m going to have to ramp up Drosophila production.
Especially since I have four other egg sacs incubating in the wings. These are fecund little critters.
Oh, hey, also: I’ve been noticing that YouTube demonetizes these spider videos very quickly. Does YouTube have arachnophobia, or am I doing something wrong? Not too worried about it — I don’t expect to make a fortune from home movies of spiders — but it’s just a curious thing.
I must update my diary. Change is happening fast, and I begin to fear that my experiment, my delving into esoteric, alien knowledge, could outstrip my feeble efforts at control. Let this be a record to explain my fate.
Prelude: I opened the mysterious sac, and to my delight, discovered beautiful jewels: like opalescent pearls, they rested quietly in a great mass, promising fortune for the future.
Day Zero: I kept the pearly orbs in a glass chamber, where I could observe them whenever I desired. I often desired. My eyes were drawn to their simple elegance, time after time. My obsession, I realize now, was a portent of danger.
Day One: O Glorious Day! The orbs dissolved away to reveal candy-like, plump babies, pale and soft, capable of only feeble stirrings of their pallid limbs. Such innocence warmed my heart.
Day Two: Their limbs have lengthened. They walk about clumsily, but still somewhat endearingly, peering about with their eight eyes. I try not to notice that a few of their siblings seem to be motionless, empty husks, drained of all life and flesh, but perhaps they are just molted exoskeletons? One can hope. I feel a vague disquiet, so as a precaution, I scatter a few flies in the dish.
Day Three: I peek into their chamber. All is quiet. The flies all lie dead and crumpled, sucked dry, but of the Children of the Orbs, almost nothing. The dish is quiet and empty. I examine the egg sac, and find it also nearly empty, with only a few scouts meandering about, and a tiny few babies just stirring at the bottom. Where have they all gone?
Then I notice a thin strand of webbing from the egg sac, stretching upward and to the side. I follow it, and there, massing on the lip of the chamber, is a great army of spiders, clustering together and building a citadel of cobwebs. They are working together. They are cooperating. What are they planning? Escape? Rushing their captor? Constructing an altar for the dark ritual that will summon Atlach-Nacha, the spider god, and begin their reign? I do not know.
Warning: Brief appearance of adult spiders in this video.
Remember that egg sac I cracked open yesterday? Everyone was so concerned that the eggs would be vulnerable, so I checked up on them today.
They’re fine! So I show off some of my microscopy gadgets for a while.
The eggs have a hard, dry shell around them, and are nearly perfectly spherical. They roll around like teeny-tiny BBs in the petri dish.
It’s weird how you start noticing spiders everywhere you go. This one is living in our shower — she’s a lovely pale gray and blends in like a delicate little shadow.
You do know if you ever visit, that we tend to tolerate — even encourage — our house spiders, and give them names. Just so you know.
I know you’re out there! So here’s some helpful advice on how to spider-proof your home. It’s not going to help you much, because in order to show you how to remove spiders, they have to show you a big-ass hairy Australian spider-beast.
I spent a good chunk of my morning fussing over my spider colony, tidying up their vials and making sure they all had food (crickets for the larger ones, wingless fruit flies for the little guys.) I currently have 10 total adults, 8 females and 2 males, and a countless swarm of spiderlings that I’m gradually sorting out into individual dishes.
The current roster:
Females:
The ones in blue have had a successful hatching, and are currently sharing their vial with some unknown number of babies. I’m slowly working on separating them.
The ones in red have an egg sac.
This is promising — they seem to be awesomely fecund. I’m going to have to wait on supplies before I can start doing mad science on the embryos, though. For now I’ll be content with just building up the colony and figuring out what I’m doing.
Uh, about Larry…Larry’s on the small side, and I initially only got a rough look at their morphology with a hand lens, and just today I got a good look under the scope. Larry’s a girl. Come on, people, I’m new at this — I’ll keep practicing at recognizing their sexes.
Males:
Fewer males. I don’t know whether it’s due to high mortality upon encountering females, or if it’s just sampling bias. They are smaller and harder to spot.
These are all wild caught adults, found in our garage and sun porch. Credit where credit is due: Mary found them all, and lately she’s been catching them herself. True story: I was just reading papers, and had put together a few vials and things to begin the process of spider catching, when she told me there was a lovely spider on the door of the sun room, and asked was it the right species? And of course it was, so I clumsily scooped up Amanda and took her to the lab. And now Mary has the search image for these spiders locked into her brain, and she prowls around and spots them with her eagle eyes, and I haven’t had to do a lick of work.
Bad news, everyone. Fred is dead. Betty ate him. I’m hoping he at least fulfilled his biological destiny before getting his guts sucked out.
More bad news: as I expected, baby spiders are murderous little cannibals, and there’s been a fair bit of fratricide going on, even though they had plenty of fruit flies strolling about. I’ve now separated them all and the survivors now have their own little chambers with their own little fruit fly to gnaw on.
I made a quick video update. Don’t watch it if you’ve got the arachnophobia.
Here’s a story about a lab that has a substantially greater investment in spider science than I do.
