Where is the informed discussion of alien life on the internet?

Oh, god, the assumptions. I like speculations about alien life, just as I appreciate the diversity of life on Earth, the different forms of life in the past, and the prospect of evolution in the future, but every time I read about this stuff in astronomy-related journals, I feel like they’re making an effort to reduce my intelligence. The problem is that they have no imagination and no biology, but they’re trying to imagine the nature of alien biology, and all they end up doing is running around in circles trying to figure out why little grey humanoids aren’t landing their flying saucers en masse to march out and shake hands with the president. It’s all Fermi Paradox this and Drake Equation that, two stupid ideas that have captured the eyeballs of everyone with these biased priors, and they always go trotting off to get the opinions of the same spectacularly ill-informed people. Take this bad article in Universe Today.

The first horror: they favorably cite Robin Hanson, the creepiest economist in America, and they quote a contradictory statement by him.

Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?

Why? Why do you think a “bright future” is equivalent to “expanding to fill the universe with lasting life”? Why do you think that’s the road we’re on, when there’s a total absence of viable colonies of humans on other worlds, and all the other planets in our solar system are uninhabitable, and planets around other stars are unreachable? What is the basis for thinking that we have that particular “bright” future in front of us, especially when you immediately admit that the chances are astronomically low?

This is my problem with the general tenor of these speculations. They all assume that we, that is human-like intelligences, are desirable, inevitable, and the only proper kind of life; they’ve read far too many science-fiction novels prophesying a colonialist destiny led by strong-jawed Anglo-Saxons with glinting eyes and a finger on the trigger of their blaster. They never seem to consider that the truly successful clades on Earth are things like algae, grass, protists, and insects. If we were to speculate on the species with bright futures, they’d all be weedy and prolific and adaptable to a wide range of environments. They wouldn’t be overgrown monkeys who can’t even imagine a non-monkey future.

The second person the article cites is weirdo philosopher Nick Bostrom. It’s funny how these kinds of stories always shy away from talking to evolutionary biologists. It’s probably because we tend to get all squinky-eyed and sarcastic about their faulty premises. Or is that just me?

The Great Filter can be thought of as a probability barrier. It consists of [one or] more highly improbable evolutionary transitions or steps whose occurrence is required in order for an Earth-like planet to produce an intelligent civilization of a type that would be visible to us with our current observation technology.

See? That’s what I’m talking about. They’re always going on and on about the likelihood of finding an intelligent civilization like ours. Why not speculate about finding a planet that has produced kangaroos? Or stomatopods? Or baobab trees? These are all unlikely outcomes of a contingent, complex process that produces immense diversity, and they’re all wondering what the “barrier” is that prevents our kind from winning the cosmic lottery every time. Get over it, we’re not a favored outcome, there’s no direction to evolution, and that’s why there aren’t smarty-pants bipeds tootling about the galaxy stopping by for tea. That and physics, probably. I also don’t understand why mobs of physicists aren’t rising up and pointing at the speed of light and the energy requirements for interstellar flivvers and saying “That’s why!”

Then this article has to take a predictable slant in a section titled…

Gotta Love the Drake!

No, you don’t. The Drake equation is a simplistic collection of variables with no suggestion of mutual dependency that are concatenated to provide a whole string of excuses for why human-like aliens aren’t sending us their version of “I Love Lucy”. It’s basically a Ouija board for apologists for science-fiction outcomes. It’s a tool for churning out meaningless crap. It’s kind of like how the article ends with this self-serving statement.

We have written many interesting articles about the Great Filter, the Fermi Paradox, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and related concepts here at Universe Today.

Again, no you haven’t. If I were an editor at Universe Today, I’d scratch out the word “interesting”, and maybe, to throw them a bone, write in “infuriating”.

One more thing that annoys me. They cite Hanson again, saying that one of the benchmarks for his preferred flavor of alien intelligence features Wide-scale colonization. I’m just thinking, given his other criteria, that any planet suitable for colonization is already going to contain a fascinating extraterrestrial biota — they wouldn’t have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, or soil, or exploitable organic materials otherwise — and from a biologist’s point of view, the “colonization” he considers desirable is going to involve the destruction of native species on a large scale. We’re lucky, given that it’s Hanson, that he didn’t speculate on the universality of rape. That’s more his thing.

’tis the season

My spider family is going mad, spewing baby spiderlings everywhere. I came into the lab today just to maintain and feed the several hundred hatchlings I’d acquired over the past few days, and what do I find? Another egg sac has opened up, and another hundred or more babies are begging for attention.

Yeah, yeah, I was a responsible parent, and I separated out as many as I could and put them into nice clean vials. I’m reaching capacity, though. This means I have about 300+, maybe as many as 400, itty bitty Parasteatoda offspring in my lab, packed into two incubators. Looking ahead optimistically, I can maybe accommodate 60 adults in the lab, if I pair up males and females. It feels weird to say it, but I’m good if I have 80% mortality in the babes.

I suppose if they thrive I can just turn the majority loose in my basement.

Hungry hungry spiders

All these baby spiders hatched out over the last few days, and I had to start feeding them. I’ve got a lot of flies, I opened each vial one by one, and tossed in a surprised wingless fly. All the babies, even though they’re only two days old, had strung silken lines all over the place — baby’s first death trap! — and were waiting patiently, hanging upside down like the grown ups, and wow, were they ever excited when the first fly was snared!

Here’s a pair of Parasteatoda juveniles, literally seconds after I put a single fly in. They descended on it immediately. Baby’s first kill!

I’m about halfway through the feeding. It’s starting to go faster as I get better at manipulating massive numbers of flies. The Runestone line is all completely fed now, with the corpses of their twitching prey piling up. I think I’ll take a break and feed the remainder tomorrow.

SO MANY SPIDERS!

Yesterday, one Parasteatoda egg sac popped and sent out a cloud of baby spiders I was struggling to corral. Today, another hatch!

I’m going to be here in the lab for a while. I have to separate these out into individual vials and feed each of yesterday’s spiders. It’s hard work being the Mother of All Spiders. I hope I’ve got enough flies.

Sorted, sorta.

I estimate there are about 160 spiders in all those tubes. I couldn’t possibly put single individuals in each, I don’t have enough space — so there are two or three in each, with 8 or so in the larger cube-shaped containers. I found an efficient way to move them. I’d just hold the container with the whole clutch at a slight vertical angle, and the babies would make their way to the edge and leap off, rappelling downwards, and I’d lower them on their threads into a tube and brush the silk against the lip, and then cut them off with a sponge. It worked well enough that I had no accidents that I noticed, which in part accounts for the larger numbers here over the previous day’s catch.

These, by the way, are called the H line because I caught the mother and egg sac at the Horticulture Display Garden. Mom is fine, she’s in one of the containers, too.

Both of these clutches are from wild-caught spiders found outdoors, which troubles me a bit. I’ve definitely got to get at least one batch from indoor spiders — I’ve got some egg sacs like that right now, but I’ve had a very low success rate from their ilk. Maybe country spiders are more fecund than city spiders?

I can’t always muster the energy to read pseudoscience

If you’d like to get depressed about the state of scientific publishing, skim through this thread by Elisabeth Bik. It’s about someone named Alireza Sepehri who is publishing utter garbage in various journals, claiming that there are male and female flu viruses, cancers from men and women have opposite polarity, 5G radiation punches holes in nuclear membranes and viruses spontaneously generate in the cavities, etc., etc., etc.

I was briefly tempted to read one of these terrible articles, but was suddenly struck with a brief flash of wisdom and realized that I could determine the quality of the work with a brief glance at the abstracts or the figures, and dismiss them instantly.

Which makes me wonder…how much effort the “reviewers” put into critically reading the submitted papers. And now I’m wondering — maybe the reviewers for that journal are imaginary, and the journal should be shut down. And maybe, in my world of fantastical reasonableness, publishers couldn’t make bank churning out garbage journals like the Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents.

I’d say you can stop asking me these questions now, but I know they’ll continue

I’ve noticed that there are two kinds of responses people make when they learn I’m studying spiders. 1) They tell me about the terrible spider bites they’ve been getting lately, and 2) they ask if it’s true that people swallow thousands of spiders while sleeping in their lifetime. At least now I can cite this definitive response from Andrea Haberkern in answer to the first. Spiders have no interest in biting anyone!

Bite Post FAQs
1. Can anyone tell me what bit me?
Doctors nor entomologists nor arachnologists can ID bites from a bite alone in the majority of cases. There are likely a handful of exceptions, as in the case of some tick bites that have signs but overall this is not the case. So, if a someone tells you “it’s a spider bite” or “it’s a recluse bite” without seeing the animal itself do the biting, chances are it is something else entirely …but, more on that later…

2. What can we do about this bite?
First and foremost- this is a nature appreciation group, not a medical advice group. Medical advice is not allowed by any members. No members, to my knowledge, are medical doctors. If you or a loved one is suffering negative effects from a bite, please seek medical attention.

3. Do you think a spider bit me?
No. The reason for this is boils down to basic spider biology. I would venture to say that the vast majority of “spider bites” are something else entirely. I think many people believe that spiders go around biting sleeping people, falling from trees just to bite you or are sneaking around looking for their next tasty human to chomp on. I’m assuming the reason this is such a common misconception is likely due to a lack of understanding of what these animals are all about. So… spiders evolved venom to eat insects and other small prey. They use it to immobilize their prey. Just like it takes your body a tremendous amount of energy through food intake to conduct daily activities, it also costs spiders a lot of energy to produce this venom. Why would an animal that needs a substance to eat go around wasting it on mammals when it has nothing to gain for it? It wouldn’t. Now, I’m not saying spiders never bite. Any animal with a mouth can bite. If you grab a spider, I bet it will bite you- just like if you grab a squirrel it will bite you. But I don’t hear anyone saying squirrels are jumping into peoples’ beds while they sleep just to bite them. So why spiders? Spiders will bite in self-defense, but just to add to the unlikelihood of being bit by a spider- most species will do several other defense tactics before resorting to biting. These tactics include: fleeing, playing dead, threat displays, falling to the ground, kicking silk at you and, in some species, throwing poop at you. Biting is an absolute last resort, again because venom is energetically costly and its main purpose is to eat not defense, so you practically have to force a spider to bite you. Just to drive the point home even further- I would place money on the fact that I am likely one of the only people in here who has actually been bitten by a spider. But put that into perspective- I have to manhandle, harass and grab spiders, literally thousands of times, for my work…but even still- I’ve only been bitten a dozen or less times out of thousands of rough handling… I’ve deserved it every time. So, no, I don’t think a spider bit you. Even in cases where a spider was in the general vicinity… false blame is likely to blame.

4. So if a spider didn’t bite me what did?
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of other animals (and plants) that are more likely to have bit you or caused you skin irritations. These include anything that does either directly feed on us or uses bites/irritations as a defense. Examples of organisms that are a way more likely culprit for your skin issues include, but are not limited to: some midges, chiggers, mosquitoes, poison oak/poison ivy, horse flies, sand flies, fleas, stinging nettle, ticks, assassin bug defensive bites, conenose bugs, ant/bee/wasp stings and even some plant/fruit eating bugs that will take the occasional nibble.. etc. etc.

5. But but but I saw 2 puncture holes in my skin, it had to be a spider….
This is a myth. I think it comes from a common misunderstanding of spider mouthparts. Most people assume that all spider chelicerae (fangs) face downward like that of a tarantula and therefore cause 2 bite marks. This is not the case. Only the Mygalomorphs (tarantulas, trapdoor spiders and Aussie funnelwebs) have their mouthparts oriented like this. But seeing that tarantulas and kin are much larger spiders- I think you would physically see if one bit you. So, when someone says “I know this much smaller spider bit me even though I didn’t see the spider because I have 2 bite marks” … there several reasons why this is not the case. First, most spiders’ mouthparts are oriented to meet side to side not parallel facing downward (if the visual is too hard to imagine google image search “Mygalomorph versus Araneomorph mouthparts”) So, if one bit you, a single puncture would be more likely from where the 2 fangs meet. Next, if there were 2 bite marks in the skin caused by a spider- this would have to be a BIG spider for them to even be visible- I highly doubt a spider of that size is capable of sneaking in, biting you without you seeing it, then sneaking away in the night to leave you with only 2 little vampire marks as “proof”. Many many insects will bite multiple times in a localized manner, and considering how much more likely insects are to bite humans than spiders in the first place, that again is more likely your little biting friend.
Spiders rule,
-Andrea

As for the second question…no spider would blithely crawl into a large carnivore’s mouth. Do you also think hippopotamuses lounge about complaining about all the humans who wandered into their gullets while they were sleeping? No. The whole idea is nonsense, and I’d really like to know where that myth started. I’ve been surprised at how many people ask me if it’s true that people swallow 8 (or some other number) spiders a night, when only a moment’s thought would tell you it’s absurd.

P.S. I’ve never been bitten by a spider, but then I only work with little house spiders. They’ve also never leapt into my mouth.

I’m a proud papa!

I’ve been eagerly checking on my colony every day for the last week or two, because I was expecting a happy event. Tonight, it happened! The babies hatched out!

I expect you all to follow the the tradition and tell me how beautiful my baby is.

Well? I’m waiting!

There were somewhere upward of 80 babies that emerged today. This meant I had to immediately separate all of them into individual vials, or in many cases, 2 or 3 babies in a vial (I’ll separate them further later). I was just sitting there frantically plucking up spiders with a paintbrush and popping them into new vials, which was busy enough, but then…oops. I dropped the egg sac. I’m a klutz.

What happened next is that swarms of tiny, pin-head sized spiders were scurrying off to escape, usually taking flight on a thread of silk. So for about 20 minutes I was sitting there with a paintbrush in one hand and watchmaker forceps in the other, squinting into the air of the lab, my hands darting out to snag a nearly invisible strand of gossamer silk with a nearly microscopic dot of a baby spider on it.

I know some of them got away (sorry, lab neighbors — they’re tiny and cute, don’t worry) because even as I was putting everything away to go home I kept finding more strands hanging from my microscope, or from my computer, or from me. Who knows? I might have some on me right now.

I’ve got lots of baby spiders stuffed into my incubator now. Tomorrow I’ll give each one a fly, and I’ll start tracking their development and health.

Note the “R”. I’m calling this my Runestone line, because the mother (in the individual vial) and the egg sac were collected at Kensington Runestone park.

Now for a little dread: I’ve got 6 more egg sacs in the lab. I’m gonna need a bigger incubator and more tube racks.

More spiders! But only trustworthy spiders, please

There has been a pleasant change to my in-box. I’m used to getting hate-mail and gay porn, but nowadays I get a flood of spider mail. People are taking photos of the spiders they’re noticing around their house and sending them to me! Some of you might think that’s worse, but I’m thrilled! It means I’m getting through to people and helping them appreciate biology more, which is exactly what I want to do. The only problem right now is that I’m getting so many photos that I can’t acknowledge them all — sorry, but I do like them.

Although I do have to mention one problem. I was sent a link to this article about an interesting spider phenomenon, which reports that “climate change is making spiders more aggressive.” As someone getting more interested in spider behavior, and planning some potential student projects around that kind of stuff I’ll be able to do over the winter. However, the article is about a paper by Jonathan Pruitt, and I have to remind you all — Jonathan Pruitt has been under suspicion of having fabricated data, and multiple papers have been retracted.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt—the holder of one of the prestigious Canada 150 Research Chairs—and it may get a lot worse. What began with questions about data in one of Pruitt’s papers has flared into a social media–fueled scandal in the small field of animal personality research, with dozens of papers on spiders and other invertebrates being scrutinized by scores of students, postdocs, and other co-authors for problematic data.

Already, two papers co-authored by Pruitt, now at McMaster University, have been retracted for data anomalies; Biology Letters is expected to expunge a third within days. And the more Pruitt’s co-authors look, the more potential data problems they find. All papers using data collected or curated by Pruitt, a highly productive researcher who specialized in social spiders, are coming under scrutiny and those in his field predict there will be many retractions. The furor has even earned a Twitter hashtag—#PruittData.

That guy is going to be tainting the field for years, and I can’t trust his work until it’s been replicated.

Grass spiders taking over

Today is the day I dread: I have to go into the lab and scrub fly bottles and do some general clean up. Responsibilities, yo. Shininess will ensue.

Also, we went on a mini-adventure last night, waiting until full darkness fell and then prowled around our house with a UV lamp and headlights. Unfortunately, I was disappointed — lots of active spiders, but they were all grass spiders. Grass spiders are all over the place, and they sort of take over every summer, but I just can’t get excited about them.

Check out the outside of your house — I bet you’ve got lots of funnel webs around with these shy guys hiding within them.

[Read more…]