Every Tuesday and Friday, I hang out with the spiders and give them flies and mealworms to eat. I am a good and supportive boss. Unfortunately, the one thing I expect of them is that they produce egg sacs for me, and they haven’t been doing their job. I provide humidifiers, I maintain a strict July-like light schedule, I keep them warm, and what do they give me? Nada. Bupkis.
I’m beginning to think I might need to modify the incentives here.
Except…it would be counterproductive to do that to the females, and most of the male are already dead due to natural causes (which, for spiders, includes cannibalism). It’s a little bit frustrating.
Perhaps, you’re playing the wrong music?
Which does suggest some other interesting studies, once this bottleneck gets cleared. Sensitivity to infrasound…
Otherwise, to properly bolster the numbers in the ranks of your spider army, you might have to introduce a genetic modification to introduce parthenogenesis.
And thus begins a month of nightmares amongst some readers…
Given current political situations in regrettably large portions of the USA, the idea of parthenogenesis, if it were at all realistic, would induce far more than a single month of nightmares.