Classes resume in two weeks! <brain screaming>

I think I’ve got it under control, probably, although the internal sensations of doom and helpless descent into a spiral of chaos will continue until December. I’m meeting my co-instructor for cell biology this morning to synchronize our watches and re-attune our wavelengths, and my syllabi are nearly done, except that the other day the administration sent out another wave of boilerplate we have to attach to them. I don’t get the point of most of it; these are pages and pages of cover-your-ass copy that every single class will give to every student every semester for the next four years, and I’m pretty sure they all read the syllabus to get the list of readings and the dates of the exams and then skip the rest. I don’t blame them. That’s what I’d do.

On top of that, my spiders are erupting in babies right now, with another egg sac due to hatch out in the next day or so. My plan is to pull out a sample that I can set aside for observation, and the rest will be set free in my garage to hopefully prepare for overwintering. I’m curious to see how Steatoda triangulosa will do in a home environment, anyway. Maybe some will populate the compost bin, too?

I’ve got about 150 spiders in the incubators right now, which somewhat stresses me out with the burden of feeding every other day. And now I have to also feed students’ brains on top of that? I may have to set some priorities here.

Do spiders dream of arthropod sheep?

You ever watch a sleeping cat or dog, and see their little paddy-paws twitching and their legs all curled up? Cute, isn’t it? You can just imagine they’re dreaming.

Spiders do it, too.

Jumping spiders are special because, unlike most arthropods which have fixed eye positions — they have to turn their heads to change their field of view — they have telescope eyes which can swivel, so you can actually see their eyes move while they are presumably sleeping. This has led some investigators to suggest they have a kind of REM sleep.

Sleep and sleep-like states are present across the animal kingdom, with recent studies convincingly demonstrating sleep-like states in arthropods, nematodes, and even cnidarians. However, the existence of different sleep phases across taxa is as yet unclear. In particular, the study of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is still largely centered on terrestrial vertebrates, particularly mammals and birds. The most salient indicator of REM sleep is the movement of eyes during this phase. Movable eyes, however, have evolved only in a limited number of lineages—an adaptation notably absent in insects and most terrestrial arthropods—restricting cross-species comparisons. Jumping spiders, however, possess movable retinal tubes to redirect gaze, and in newly emerged spiderlings, these movements can be directly observed through their temporarily translucent exoskeleton. Here, we report evidence for an REM sleep–like state in a terrestrial invertebrate: periodic bouts of retinal movements coupled with limb twitching and stereotyped leg curling behaviors during nocturnal resting in a jumping spider. Observed retinal movement bouts were consistent, including regular durations and intervals, with both increasing over the course of the night. That these characteristic REM sleep–like behaviors exist in a highly visual, long-diverged lineage further challenges our understanding of this sleep state. Comparisons across such long-diverged lineages likely hold important questions and answers about the visual brain as well as the origin, evolution, and function of REM sleep.

If this were happening in a cat or a dog we’d easily assume the behaviors were a reflection of whatever they were dreaming about. It would be nice to imagine this was just as true of spiders, but I’m going to be slightly skeptical of the idea that the behavior is indicative of “dreaming” or even analogous to REM sleep. The authors are cautious, too.

The complex visual and cognitive behaviors of salticids and their relatively small nervous system facilitate experimental tests of the role of visual experience in REM sleep–like retinal movements. Eye movement patterns during REM sleep have been hypothesized to be directly linked to the visual scene experienced while dreaming—begging the deeper question of whether jumping spiders may be experiencing visual dreams. This raises a unique opportunity to test this “scanning hypothesis” in jumping spiders, where retinal movements can be observed. Since visual input can be controlled in jumping spiders early on (unlike in humans), retinal responses to repeated visual stimuli presented during the day might partially reappear during REM sleep–like states.

The problem I have is that we don’t know all that is going on in the brains of humans during dreaming or REM sleep — so how can we compare that to what spiders experience? A deeper analysis of the activity of the nervous system would be needed to do a good comparison, and this paper is only looking at behavior.

An alternative to “dreaming”: spiders go through waves of alertness during sleep. At some levels, they are awake enough to monitor their environment, so those eye movements aren’t a consequence of dreams — that’s the spider doing sentry duty, scanning what’s around it to search for prey or threats. The movements tell us nothing about the inner life of a spider, only that it wants to eat or avoid being eaten. You know they don’t have eyelids, right? They aren’t as blind as we are while sleeping.

That doesn’t mean the behavior lacks any homology with vertebrates. Maybe our REM sleep is also a consequence of the evolution of rising and falling levels of alertness, and dreaming is just a side effect of brains randomly invoking patterned activity on top of all that.

If spiders dream, though, I do wonder what bloodthirsty scenarios are playing out in their heads. That may also be similar to vertebrate dreaming — I don’t think my cat dreams of frolicking in fields of dandelions, but of ripping the heads off smaller mammals. But that’s my psycho cat.

Minnesota election went as expected

Yesterday’s primaries set up the big November election, where it will be incumbent Democrat Walz vs lunatic anti-vax, anti-abortion Republican Jensen for the the governor’s chair. I hope the main election follows the path this one took, in that all the candidates I voted for actually won. I’ll try to repeat my flawless performance again in a few months.

Outside my district, Ilhan Omar beat a Democratic challenger, barely. Neighboring Wisconsin is a mess, with Republicans arguing over who is the Trumpiest and yelling about the opposition being “liberal”. That’s enough, just call a Democrat “liberal” and that’ll get you votes. I’m hoping we can see the odious Johnson replaced by a black Democrat, Barnes, but you just can’t trust the Wisconsin electorate. All that cheese and ranch dressing has poisoned their brains.

Am I supposed to care?

The FBI raided Trump’s house in Florida.

Former president Donald Trump said Monday that the FBI had raided his Mar-a-Lago Club and searched his safe — activity related to an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the probe.

This trivial act seems to have thrown the MAGAts into hysterical fits.

I’m sorry, but if you weren’t outraged at the killing of Breonna Taylor, you should sit this one out. This “raid” was practically deferential — they got a formal warrant, guys in suits walked in and searched for some papers, and they walked out. That’s what the justice system ought to do, getting a warrant to respect privacy concerns, and using it to undramatically gather information. Do the right-wingers think Trump had something to hide?

Of course, the media is also in a tizzy.

Searching a former president’s property to look for possible evidence of a crime is highly unusual and would require approval at the top levels of the Justice Department. It represents a historic moment in Trump’s tortured relationship with the Justice Department, both in and out of the White House.

Why is it unusual? Why does it require unusually high levels of approval? The guy is a private citizen. The process should require no greater care than searching my home or your home or anyone’s home. An ex-president should have no greater rights than anyone else. I thought this country was supposed to be founded on a principle that there is no aristocracy? (As with most myths about the founding, that one’s a lie.)

Meanwhile, you know that Trump was sloppy and heedless of confidentiality issues. His entire gang is. Would you believe that part of the fallout from Alex Jones phone data is that he had a naked photo of his wife that he sent to Roger Stone? I’m more dismayed by that than that the FBI served a lawful warrant and gathered documents that might (emphasis on “might”, they might exonerate him. Ha.) be embarrassing to a shameless ex-president.

Undergraduates: xkcd is not a good source for career advising

I must object to the methodology and the conclusions of this comic.

The choice of prefixes to sample is arbitrary and shows a bias towards common physics terms. Why not use “evolutionary” or “genome” or “analytic” or “necro-” or “chrono-“, to name just a few more. The sample space has hardly been touched.

The idea that low Google scholar counts is an opportunity is ludicrous and confuses cause and effect. “Clown” is a prefix that doesn’t show up for either physics or biology or engineering (curiously, there are 3 entries for “clown chemistry”, 5 for “clown psychology”, 1 for “clown dentistry”, and 13 for “clown theology”). I don’t think this implies there is a hot market for clown physicists.

Although, I do think that high-energy clown physics might be a fun field.

Another week, another data point

I’m still regularly collecting data on growth rates in Steatoda triangulosa. Here’s what it looks like on day 39 (dark red line is the mean, I’ve included data for individual spiders in a lighter color to illustrate the variation):

They’re now at about, or over, half the adult body size, and are looking fairly mature. The palps haven’t fully matured, so I can’t sex them very well, but the ones I suspect are male — they just have a bit of a bulge — are on the smaller size. The couple that have really taken off look very female to me so far.

I’m discovering all kinds of complications, though. In particular, size is definitely a function of feeding. I gave them all a mealworm earlier this week, and some of them look hugely rotund right now. Fruit flies are definitely not adequate for the full nutrition of a growing spider, so it looks like I’m going to need to spruce up the mealworm colony soon. I’ve got another S. triangulosa egg sac that has reached the stage of seething darkness, which means I’ll have more babies this week.

Also the pigmentation is distinct and strong, and now it’s obvious that these spiders have white triangles on a dark background, rather than dark stripes on a pale background. This next batch of babies are going to require daily mapping of pigment patterns so I can see exactly what’s going on. I’m about to post a few photos on the Patreon page, if you want to see.

It takes courage to visit CPAC

Wanna see a toothy asshole being obnoxious? No? Too bad, here it is.

The obnoxious one actually posted this clip to his website as if he was proud of his behavior, or thought he was funny or clever. He was neither.

On top of his smug harassment, though, what I found most telling is that his complaints were all false. She’s the only one wearing a mask — but she was in the right, and all the smirking jerks in the crowd were wrong. He pesters about her vaccination status, and she rightly tells him it’s none of his business, but he goes on to babble about how she’s “viral shedding”. No, she’s not. That’s a right wing fiction.

So that’s what right-wing criticism is like.

I hope the Vice reporter got hazard pay.

It doesn’t work on spiders

Mary told me I should mention this app, Merlin Bird ID, in case you don’t already have it. You fire it up, click on a button, and it just listens and tells you what birds it hears. I got it a while back because the crazy early morning bird cacophony was bugging me — at least I ought to know who’s shrieking at me early in the morning. I can sit in my office and have it inform me what all the noise is about. This morning it was black-capped chickadees chattering away, blue jays and redwinged blackbirds making a ruckus, and an American robin fussing about. It’s not as bad as it was earlier this summer, because we also have a Cooper’s hawk hanging about in the neighborhood. When it squeaks, it gets quiet, briefly.

Hey, I’ve noticed fewer squirrels making pests of themselves lately. I wonder if I should play recordings of a Cooper’s hawk when they start climbing the bird feeder and scrabbling at my window. (Before you say squirrels are pretty clever and will just learn to ignore the noise, that’s part of the plan: they’ll become more vulnerable to hawks then.)

If you’re more of a visual person, I’ll also recommend Seek from iNaturalist. Put that on your phone, aim it at any organism, and it’ll use the iNaturalist database to let you know the scientific name of what you’re seeing. It’s very handy. It even works on spiders, unlike the Bird ID program.