Busy, busy, busy. The hatching yesterday means that I’m going to spend the morning sorting spiders, on top of the regularly scheduled feeding day. I’ve got a bunch of adults who need crickets, a lot of baby Parasteatoda who need fruit flies, a few score Latrodectus I set aside in new vials yesterday who are going to get their first meal, and another score or two to be extracted this morning, and it’s time to start a new batch of Drosophila. I’m sort of dreading the possibility that another egg sac could start oozing spiderlings any day now.
There’s a limit to how many of these spiders I can maintain. I hate to say it, but I may end up throwing a lot of cute, adorable, lively little baby spiders into fixative for later microscopic examination. Unless you want some? I’m heading off to St Louis this weekend for Skepticon, and I could bring along some Latrodectus mactans spiderlings if anyone wants to give them a good home.
Speaking of Skepticon, I’m kind of on the schedule. I’m doing a workshop on Friday — but it’s not about spiders or evolution, directly. I’m going to present some exercises I’m using in a writing course I’ll be teaching this fall. If you want to learn about writing creative non-fiction (and maybe, if you really want getting your own baby black widow), that’s the place to be.
Just for fun, at skepticon you should go all out on the reality of Bigfoot. Let’s see how skeptical they are.
That Skepticon schedule is…uninformative.
I’ve got more than enough black widows in my garden and in my cellar for my taste. Objectively, I can admire spiders and think they’re kind of cool; subjectively I can’t stand them. Especially black widows in my cellar.
Ooh, I have great uses for any number of black widows down here in Texas! Glad to help take those off your hands!
Wait, would it be unethical to mail them to the homes and offices of Republican politicians? Yeah, it probably is, now that I think about it. I’d hate to see those poor, innocent arachnids get squashed. Please disregard.
Here I am grabbing the occasional spider that gets inside my house, with a tissue, and gently taking it outside while you’re murdering them by the hundreds? thousands?