Fantastic success, everyone! Two of the pairs of spiders featured in my spider porn video from last week have produced egg sacs! Stri7 & Stri4, and Stri2 & Stri5, to be precise. This is huge. It may be the start of, finally, a self-sustaining colony. I’ve been struggling with this for the past few years — I get a few thriving spiders, a few egg sacs, and then over the winter they die off and I need to replenish the stocks in the spring with wild-caught adults. This is no way to do genetics. Well, it is, but that’s a different kind of genetics than I want to do.
Now I can start making plans. It will be about a month before spiderlings emerge, and then another month or two (depending on how well my fortified fruit fly diet works) to reach adulthood, which means I could have a Gen IV by Hallowe’en, or Thanksgiving at the outside. Exciting! I could be doing crosses by spring term!
Also, right now I’ve got so many spiders and spiderlings I have exceeded my lab’s capacity. In another first, while in previous years I have raided my garage for new spiders, today I took a container of about 50 Steatoda triangulosa spiderlings and released them into my garage. Sorry, babies, I can’t take care of you all, so you’re going to have to forage for yourself in the hard cruel world. Winter is coming, grow up fast.
Congrats, great grandpa.
The good news about the spiders somewhat reduce my sense of disappointment over the ¿☆₩@* second delay of the Artemis 1 launch.
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Beware, the free spiders may reproduce at a geometric rate; having been exposed to your DNA there is no knowing what they will get up to.
Wait. Is PZed the Gret grandfather, or the Godfather?
PZed, do you have a dark, pinstripe suit, black shoes with white gaiters, a black Fedora, a violin case and some cotton dental thingies to put in your cheeks?
Congratulations! That is super exciting! You must be making those spiders really happy to achieve this. I know it’s not an easy task. Every single time I’ve checked at Tractor Supply, “Storey’s Guide to Raising Spiders” has been conspicuously absent.
…yay? I mean, “more spiders” isn’t the kind of thing I normally cheer on, but in your case, I’ll make an exception because you’re doing science with them.
Congratulations, PZ! I’m glad to hear your spider colony is thriving!
Sprinkle soy fly substitutes over the garage floor. Otherwise they will come back with a grudge, like Frankenstein’s rejected offspring.
Shee-it . Today was cold.
Hey, Birger. Me again. What about getting rid of your rather silly full stop in between paragraphs — to force spacing between them — by instead using a U+2003 (AKA ’em-space’)? Your paragraphing would look more natural. I trust your googling is smart enough to enter an em-space.
Rene
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What is wrong with you?
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Do you know?
@ 違う
I know. Please try to enter my name correctly. Easy peasy, double click, ctrl-c, ctrl-v. (I abstain from calling you names.)
My cellphone has no luxury tangents like that . :(