Spider update (no spider photos)

I’m getting a little anxious — my spider family is in a quiet phase right now. I have 6 breeding pairs of adults (well, Gwyneth ate her consort after mating, so 5½, and maybe bred pairs is the better term). I’m down to one egg sac — again, from Gwyneth, who is a sick Goth freak because she knitted an ugly, sloppy sac with the dead corpses of her prey imbedded in it, but it does have developing embryos inside it. She also littered the floor with decapitated fly heads. Gwyneth scares me sometimes.

But otherwise, I’m just waiting for them to produce more. My goal is to have a steady reliable output of eggs, and these little hiatuses are nerve wracking, but also understandable, since the colony is so small yet.

I do have a lot of tiny little juveniles coming up, at least. They’re getting a little overwhelming — these are my spider-children, in these little vials I picked up at JoAnn Fabrics (they’re intended for storing and sorting beads, but I have perverted them to my own wicked ends.) Thirty vials, thirty hungry little babies.

I have to go in every couple of days and tend to them. Put one or two flies in each vial (I made a little fly-shaker out of an Eppendorf tube — it’s like a salt shaker, only when you shake it flies come out), give ’em a spritz of water from an atomizer, and agonize over their health and predatory instincts. As they get big enough, I move them to an adult-sized tube, and when I’m confident of their sexual maturity, I’ll pair them up.

But right now it’s a waiting game with placid little beasties (except for Gwyneth) quietly tending to their webs, nibbling on flies and crickets, making me fret over when they’re going to spawn again.

By the way, over half the vials I’m cultivating contain Gwyneth’s progeny — she’s a fecund little monster. I’ll be interested to see if her distinctive behaviors carry on into the next generation. I’m planning on doing some inbreeding of her offspring to see if I can get a brood of savage spider mothers.

Don’t ever play the racist game

A simple question: did Elizabeth Warren have an Indian ancestor? Yes. Definitely. As Carl Zimmer explains, the science is good and robust on this one. Anyone who is arguing that this is fake science ought to be immediately fired from any job that involves setting science policy. Bye, Donald!

More complex question: does Elizabeth Warren have any legitimate claim to any kind of Indian affiliation? Nope, not that she claimed she did. And she played right into Trump’s racist hand.

Warren ended up providing one of the clearest examples yet of how Trumpian rhetoric shifts the political conversation. The woman who is hoping to become the most progressive Democratic nominee in generations is not merely letting herself get jerked around by a Trumpian taunt. She is also reinforcing one of the most insidious ways in which Americans talk about race: as though it were a measurable biological category, one that, in some cases, can be determined by a single drop of blood. Genetic-test evidence is circular: if everyone who claims to be X has a particular genetic marker, then everyone with the marker is likely to be X. This would be flawed reasoning in any area, but what makes it bad science is that it reinforces the belief in the existence of X—in this case, race as a biological category. Warren’s video will hardly convince a Trump voter, who will see only a woman who feels that she has to prove something. Trump himself has already walked back his promise of a million-dollar charity donation. Warren, meanwhile, has allowed herself to be dragged into a conversation based on an outdated, harmful concept of racial blood—one that promotes the pernicious idea of biological differences among people—and she has pulled her supporters right along with her.

See? You can understand that it is good science while also recognizing that she’s promoting odious ideological implications that are contrary to her political position.

Maybe Santa will bring me some high end optical gear for Christmas this year

I admit, I drooled a little bit: HHMI has developed this cool gadget for imaging embryos. It’s got everything: a culture chamber for mouse embryos, the latest light-sheet imaging tech, and fancy digital processing so no matter how the embryo rolls or drifts, it realigns the image. It’s been built by Phillip Keller, who did some amazing work with visualizing zebrafish.

Until now, the best views of living embryos came from fish and flies. A decade ago, Keller and colleagues developed the first “digital embryo” of the zebrafish, a kind of see-through, striped minnow often studied by scientists.

Fish embryos have the advantage that they’re shaped more like a ribbon draped over a ball of yolk, which means you can almost ignore one dimension. Mice start out sort of 2-dimensional too, but are eventually shaped like little balls with all kinds of movement in 3 dimensions over time. I’m finding that spider embryos are similarly obnoxiously thick. But look at what this machine can do!

Also, amazingly, they’re giving it all away for free. The software is all downloadable, along with plans for building the scope (building one from scratch is still out of my budget, though), and they offer free access to the instrument out at Janelia Farm. Maybe someday — I’m still working on just getting reliable embryo production and am thinking about some basic genetics, and years from now when I’m ready to do some advanced digital imaging, maybe they’ll come in boxes of Cracker Jack.

Or better yet, some of my students will move on to do it for me.