Spider therapy works!

Again, I spent another hour in the lab this morning, doing nothing but feeding spiders and cleaning up. I’ve been throwing flies at them every morning, and they’re still ravenous. I may have been under-feeding them. They’re growing young juveniles, and we all know how much teenagers can eat. The ones I’ve moved out of their little 130ml containers into spacious 5.7l living quarters are also doing fine, although they’ve just picked out one corner to fill with cobweb so far. Curiously, they’ve all picked the same corner of their respective cages, the one closest to the timed light.

I also did some cleaning therapy, scrubbing down a couple of benchtops. The place may be cleaner than it’s been in 20 years now! I bundled up some of the old fish gear; some got thrown away, another big coil of irrigation tubing was brought home. Maybe Mary will think of some use for it in the garden. There’s plenty left, but I hate to part with the PVC pipe and fittings.

I should have started doing this long ago. Committing myself to at least an hour of semi-mindless maintenance, even when I’ve got to set aside class prep and grading for a bit, gets my day off to a good start and soothes my stressed-out brain.

Everyone should do it. Tend to your spiders, whatever they may be!

Eking out a little spider time

This has been a stressful year, and I haven’t been giving the spiders the time they deserve. So I’ve recently resolved to spend an hour a day in the lab, even if all my other work is screaming at me, just tending to the basics. It’s soothing, I think, and it’ll make the spiders happy, which is what counts.

I have to go in to the university every morning anyway, to open up the fly lab and check on the status of student experiments, and now instead of rushing back to prepare for a lecture or do some grading, I have a zen-like period of contemplation in which I, for instance, feed the spiders, or wash dirty spider cages, or throw out old accumulated debris. I still have some plumbing and aquarium supplies that I’m moving out to our departmental dumpster a bit at a time. Anyone want a bucket of sand? An aquarium pump and filter? I’m putting those all behind me.

This morning I fed the babies; I’m trying out a daily feeding regimen, rather than twice a week, to see if can get them to grow a little faster. I’ve also moved some of the up-and-coming generation from the 130ml plastic cubes to 5.7l adult cages, to see if the expanded space promotes expanded growth. They look so tiny and lost in there! But they are cobwebbing them up well enough. I just hope that the flies aren’t getting lost in all that volume.

I’m also working at spiffing up the lab a bit, picking a stretch of bench every morning, cleaning it up and scrubbing it down, and just generally making it all shiny and tidy. I’ve been neglecting my patrons at my patreon account, and on my list of things to do is, in addition to more spiders as they emerge this spring, a video tour of my spider lab, maybe in the next two weeks (next weekend is hellish with grading, but maybe the weekend after that). This will initially be a patron-only video, but maybe I’ll make it public the month after. Sign up if you want to see the premiere! All the money donated every month goes to pay off our legal debt! I look forward to clearing that debt in the next few years so I can sink the money into the lab instead.

Well, that was challenging

Today I tried to lead my students through some simple genetics problems over Zoom. In class, it would be easy: put up the problem, have the students pull out a piece of paper and try to solve it, while I wander the classroom seeing what they were doing, offering hints and suggestions as I go, and at the end I’d have an idea of where the individuals were struggling.

On Zoom, nope.

I’d present the problem, and then…no, I have no way to observe the process. I told them they could let me know their answer over the private chat, and if it looked good, I’d call on them and they could explain how they solved it.

First difficulty: these are smart students, and they quickly figured out the flaw in my plan. If they gave the answer, I’d call on them; simple solution: sit on the answer for as long as possible. The first problem I put up produced a deadly silence, with all those black rectangles not showing anything, and my chat window being totally blank. I’d try to nudge them along, but not knowing where they were in the problem meant I had no idea where they were stuck. Or if they even were stuck.

They started to warm up as the hour went on — probably as they realized these weren’t really that hard, and they were seeing how to reach the solution — but it was still agonizing. It took us the whole hour to do 3 problems. And I’ve promised/threatened to do it again on Thursday. As it stands, they’re getting an exam next week and I’ve had little opportunity to interact with them to work through even simple problems.

Stupid virus. Let me get back into a real classroom again.

Birds vs. Spiders

It’s been snowing all day. The birds have been frolicking in my backyard. So I aimed a camera at them and recorded a timelapse video.

I have a sneaky purpose, though. Do bird videos draw in more viewers than spider videos? I’ll let you know in a few days.

Or a few hours. Within 3 hours, a video with just birds in it passes the traffic count accumulated by a spider video over 3 days.

I could just cry.

Dread teaching

I’m caught up on a lot of grading, but today I now have to explain while they got so much wrong. The mean on the last exam was 75, which isn’t bad, but a lot of students are certain they deserve an A on everything, so I have to tell them today that the grade they got was the grade they deserve, and then explain how to solve the problems correctly. Many of the errors were due to invalid assumptions. For example, some people were confused by the term “wild type” — they had it in their heads, largely from their introductory population genetics course, that wild type was simply the most common phenotype in the cross, so for instance, whatever the phenotype of the heterozygotes was in a simple hybrid cross, that was “wild type”. Yikes. So now I also have to reset my brain and stop assuming they know all the basic conventions.

Next bit of fun: we’re wrapping up a standard complementation assay in the lab, so I have to talk to them about writing up a lab report, which means that, while I’ve finished a painful backlog of grading, I’m about to tell them to create a lot more work for me.

Somehow, in all that, I also have to teach them about deletions, duplications, and translocations this week, and then next week we plunge into the happy world of recombination and gene mapping, and more math. Sometimes I wonder how I can keep going, since I’m pretty sure that by the end of the semester all of my students hate me.

The spider routine

In case you were curious, here’s the boring routine for maintaining a colony of cute little Parasteatoda juveniles. Teenagers! Always demanding your time.

Right now I’ve got a sink full of dirty spider containers. I’ll have to get those cleaned up this week.

Spider jump scares

Always good for a laugh.

Which reminds me…yesterday, my wife tried to cheer me up by telling me she saw some small insects in the house, which means the return of the spiders can’t be far off. This seems to be an unusual response by most hu-mans.

I’m kind of laid up from a fall yesterday, having trouble getting any sleep because any turn of my head sends alarm signals up and down my spine. This is cramping my plans. I have a spider agenda! I need to move all the spiders, especially the lady spiders, to shiny clean new containers, so they can spend the next week getting comfortable and filling it with new silk. They won’t know it, but they’ll be making their nuptial bed. Yeah, time to try breeding! They’re still on the small side, so they’re comparable to human teenagers, but we’ll see if they’re as horny as people get in their youth.

I still have concerns about species matching, though. There are two spider species, Parasteatoda tepidariorum and Parasteatoda tabulata, that I can’t tell apart, short of dissecting their genitalia, which absolutely ruins them for mating, and I don’t want to put P. tep together with P. tab, since that could just end with cannibalism (wait, different species, so not cannibalism? Just violent murder?). My solution for this go-round is simple: I’m going to put male spiders on their sister’s nuptial bed. I want an inbred line anyway.

I’ll try to record their activities next week, so maybe I’ll have a movie for you then. With any luck, it won’t be a gory murder/horror flick, but instead a little incest porn. I hear that’s popular, but have no idea why.

How many people lined up to live on Devil’s Island?

Why do artists always put domes up? We’d be living in tunnels deep under the Martian surface.

Maybe Devil’s Island is a poor analogy — prisoners sent there had a 75% mortality rate, but it was a tropical island and they had air to breathe. Mon dieu, free air! And water fell out of the sky! Maybe a Siberian gulag would be a better example. The air is still free, but it’ll eventually kill you if you try to breathe it at -50°C, and they were, of course, work camps. We really have nothing to compare with Mars here on Earth. Yet Elon Musk is dreaming of sending a million people to live there, all beholden to the company store, that is, Elon Musk. Maybe you could find a few utopians who could be fooled into moving there, but the volume Musk fantasizes over? No way. I also suspect the effort would bleed his fortune dry.

But here’s a thought experiment for you: Charlie Stross gives him everything he could want.

Let’s suppose that Musk’s Mars colony plan is as viable as his other businesses: there are ups and downs and lots of ducking and weaving but he actually gets there in the end. All the “… and then a miracle happens …” bits in the plan (don’t mention closed-circuit life support! Don’t mention legal frameworks!) actually come together, and by 2060 there is a human colony on Mars. Not just an Antarctic-style research base, but an actual city with a population on the order of 500,000 people, plus outlying mining, resource extraction, fuel synthesis, and photovoltaic power farms (not to mention indoor intensive agriculture to grow food).

Do I believe that will happen? I do not. I think when the first thousand colonists die off and the few survivors start desperately begging for rescue from this hellhole, the supply of potential colonists will wither away and that venture will end. But it’s a thought experiment — we’ll assume that it all comes together that way at first.

Then Stross flicks over one little domino…what if a new deadly coronavirus variant emerges on this distant world?

You are the Mayor of Armstrong City, facing a variant SARS pandemic, and supplies and support are 15 months away. What do you do?

Alternatively: what are the unforeseen aspects of a SARS-type disease infiltrating such a colony?

And what are the long-term consequences—the aftermath—for architecture and administration of the Mars colony, assuming they’re willing to learn and don’t want it to happen again?

I don’t know, this doesn’t seem like an unusual circumstance for a new colony. It’s happened in the past, many times. You set off to a rich, fabulous bit of country, like Virginia or Massachusetts, in a new land, and initially you’re suviving a hair’s-breadth away from catastrophe, and a plague sweeps through your colony, and it’s the 17th century so you don’t have things like vaccines or even decent medical treatments. What happens?

You die.

I don’t think there are that many unforeseen aspects of such an epidemic, although certain people want to willfully ignore the possibilities (they’re not going there after all — some other gullible sap is). This would be a colony that requires a well-maintained infrastructure to maintain the basics of life, like air, water, and food, and something will crumble and the whole thing will collapse, and everyone will die, while sending frantic, woeful transmissions back to Earth at the speed of light.

The long-term consequences will be that no one in their right mind will want to go to Mars, and the way to prevent such a catastrophe is to send robots, assuming there is some economic gain to be had from exploiting the planet in the first place.

Maybe you have a more optimistic perspective? Try to persuade me.