I only got 13 live babies out of that one hatching, which is sad and pathetic. I’m clearly going to have to go on an Egg Sac Hunt this weekend to get more.
I describe this feeble output on Patreon, with photos of the unproductive wreck of an egg sac. I’ve also put a picture of one of the healthy offspring on Instagram. And, oh yeah, on Discord. Why aren’t you on our Discord server? It’s free!
It’s the last day of the American Arachnology Society meeting. Have you ever experienced this? You’re simultaneously looking forward to many of the talks, but you’re also really looking forward to ending the deluge of information and getting back to normal? Yeah, brain overload is terrible. But at least with a virtual conference I don’t have to pack up and get on a plane and drive for half a day, and I won’t lose a few more days to con crud.
Also, now this morning I have to find time to sort babies into vials. That’s my agenda: glue eyes to microscope and delicately shoo baby spiders into new containers, then rush back to glue my eyes to a computer screen to attend to a couple of hours of webs and venom (the subjects of the first two blocks of talks today.)
You can’t fully appreciate how cute baby spiders are until you see them toddling about in a home movie.
Remember when I said I was preggers, and that I had a little transparent container on my desk I was watching? Yesterday I had noticed that the mama spider was rather agitated, and was fussing about with her egg sac, and I was getting worried that something was going wrong. I shouldn’t have worried! This afternoon while I was watching the AAS talks, I noticed some new tiny little dots near the sac — the babies have emerged! They are very cute. You’ll have to check them out on Instagram!
I gave a talk titled “The Biology of Intelligence” on Sunday to the Atheists of Florida. It went OK, I think, with some of the familiar problems of Zoom talks. I sound a bit like a Dalek at times, and early on I had a catastrophic crash — my computer went down hard and I had to restart it all — but we muddled through.
I’m not a fan of the concept of “intelligence” — it’s something we can’t define and can’t even objectively measure, yet we seem to be comfortable saying that one species is more intelligent than another. A lot of the biology research seems to be contrived towards finding morphological correlates that align with our intuition, which is just plain bad science. Maybe I just don’t trust it because nobody ever intuits that spiders are the smartest species on earth.
The Tuesday schedule from the American Arachnology Society meeting:
I’m really looking forward to the plenary, and I know there will be lots of good stuff in the contributed talks, but boy, those were fatiguing yesterday. Also one session did not keep very good time, went way overlong, and rode right over the one break. Hey, coordinators, it’s really important to keep everything on time, otherwise when am I going to get to void all the coffee I was drinking through the meeting?
Also, the informal evening sessions are useful for us amateurs. I’m planning to sit in on the spider husbandry happy hour.
I have to disagree with xkcd a little bit.
The problem with learning about biology is that everyone you meet is it
The problem is with not learning enough about biology. Once you know enough, you appreciate that the whole of your existence is wallowing in a cloud of everything and you might as well accept it — we’re all interconnected and part of the whole. Then, once you know too much, you find yourself wondering if your wife would mind if we invited a swarm of spiders to join us for a dinner date.
I made a graph.
Since people are asking, yes, the American Arachnology Society meetings are recorded. You can watch them all! Even the workshops!
I got an offer to see a picture of a scorpion yesterday, which is neat, but we don’t allow pictures in comments because we want to be kind to readers’ bandwidth and because there are trolls who would abuse it. But then I thought…hey, you know that Freethoughtblogs has a Discord server? That would be a perfect place for that sort of thing. I even created a #photos channel within it, awaiting your submissions.
I suppose I could create a spider-free channel if people demand it. But why wouldn’t everyone want to see spider photos? (Don’t bother answering, I know.)
