If this is restraint, just wait until the cops are unleashed » « I threatened to start showing spiders here again

Here come the grooms

This morning, we were gathering Parasteatoda around the house, and I guess that it’s that time of year, because we found lots of active males cruising around. We got four males right here! I just brought them in to the lab to join the lonely, love-starved females there. I’ll check back again in a few days and hope I don’t find that they were hungry for something else, leaving drained corpses everywhere.

I put a few photos of these handsomely endowed males (really, their palps are huge) on Instagram and Patreon.

If this is restraint, just wait until the cops are unleashed » « I threatened to start showing spiders here again

Comments

  1. says

    You know PZ, your recent (relatively) interest in spiders has me naming my house spiders now. I wonder what happened to Dagwood and Blondie. They were hanging out in my bathroom behind the toilet for almost a week. Seemed like such a good couple too. Maybe the silverfish got em.

    I’ve always had a live and let live attitude with spiders. One of my roommates has a problem with ants every summer. I do not. One of us kills spiders outright and one of us doesn’t. I don’t have an ant problem. But those damn silver fish are another story.

  2. Numenaster says

    I brought it two sprays of roses yesterday to replace ones that were wilting, and watched four separate species of spider emigrate from them. The yellow garden spider got taken back outside because I don’t want orb weavers in the house. The jumping spiders can stay because they don’t leave webs behind. The brown dunno-what-it-was disappeared while the yellow one was being transported.

  4. cartomancer says

    And yet when I try to capture well-endowed males for my personal sex experiments they…

    No, hang on, I’ve done that joke far too many times in the past.

  5. JoeBuddha says

    Hey, this isn’t a condemnation Focus on spiders. We’re all doing what we can, and in too many cases it’s what we can not. Personally? I come here for sanity. For the feeling that regardless of the insanity I put up with around me, that people still carry on. And there are people doing their fucking jobs despite the chaos.

  7. birgerjohansson says

    BTW, how do arachnids deal with things virus infections, if they only have the innate immune system? Since they are predators, they cannot just rely on rapid reproduction if there happens to be insufficient prey animals when disease hits. Predators must be more sensitive to disruptions than other animals.