More eerie cave creatures!

Um Ladaw Cave in India is a chamber 300 feet below the surface that fills to the brim with water in the rainy season, and is only accessible in the winter dry season…well, “accessible” is a relative term. This is how you get there.

Once you make the descent, there are pools of water filled with a large population of pale, blind cave fish. These are big fish, too. They are probably fed by the constant trickle of organic material flowing down from the surface. Deep caves are also a nesting place for bats that poop into the water, which just tells you that some animals can eat anything.

That kind of diet must leave them desperate — in the video, you can see them trying to gnaw on the camera lens. Anything is fair game.

The existence of this pattern of pigment and eye loss in multiple species around the world tells you that something as complex as vision requires constant maintenance via natural selection, though. It’s remarkably consistent that animal species living in the total darkness of deep caves tend to all become pallid and blind over time.

Behold! The official Myers Lab Spider-Cam!

Remember how I complained about my defunct microscope camera? I complain no more. Thanks to a gift from an exceedingly generous donor, I now have a brand new beautiful Canon camera for the lab! Here it is, mounted on a microscope adapter on my Wild M3C; I can also mount it on my Leica.

So glorious. It’s going to see a lot of use, too. I share this scope with my colleagues in the department, and they can also use it to photograph their non-spider specimens. Most kindly, it also came with a collection of lenses, which means I can use it for more than just lab work — I’m trying to get funding for a summer student to do a spider diversity survey, and this means we’ll both be going out around West Central Minnesota, documenting spiders all over the place.

This is going to make my work so much easier. Next, I’m going to have to get some really tiny things I can photograph on the new setup — in the next week or so, I’ll post some samples.

It was like Christmas around here this afternoon! An entirely secular, scientific Christmas, of course.

I ♥ my hot glue gun & Dremel

It’s a busy day with all these job interview related things, but over my lunch hour I banged out 8 more spider cages, even with my gimpy left arm. I used a saw attachment on my Dremel (sorry, neighbors, if there was a lot of high-pitched screaming noises from my lab) to quickly hack up some bamboo strips and quarter-inch dowels, and then slapped them all together with hot glue. So easy.

I’m letting them cool now, and then I have to go through and clear out the threads of hardened glue scattered around — although the spiders probably won’t mind the strings — and let any fumes air out for a day, and then fill them up with more spiders.

And clean up. My lab is full of sawdust and little scraps of wood right now.

New cage is a success so far

You may be pleased to hear that my initial test of my new spider cage architecture didn’t kill my test subject, and she actually looks a little more lively and relaxed this morning. She has started filling in a web and was hangin’ upside down and chillin’ like a boss — now that she has a bit of a cobweb, I’ll toss some flies in this morning and see how she reacts.

Then this weekend I’ll have to assemble another dozen or so frames. It takes about 5 minutes to cut sticks to size and tack ’em together with hot glue, so that won’t be too time-consuming.

Crazy fly lady syndrome

I’ve been getting worried about the spider colony lately — I saw a phenomenon last year that I’m seeing again, where elderly female spiders begin hoarding the carcasses of their prey, and building thick, tangled webs that they hunker down in and don’t move. They wrap up all these dead flies into a mass and also scrabble up random debris to make a nest (the latter is probably normal) and they cease being productive. I also see the production of dead egg collections, often without even bothering to build an egg sac. Here’s an example:

Yuck. Filthy. You might spot the yellowish egg clumps at the top right and near the center. I’ve never seen this in the wild — usually the webs are regularly purged of dead prey — and it could be that this is a normal consequence of aging (senile spiders!) or I could have cause and effect reversed…maybe it’s the accumulation of filth that makes for unhappy spiders. I should just clean up the cage and see if it makes them happy and ‘normal’ again!

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Look what I’ve got…

Adam Rutherford, lovely gentleman that he is, sent me a review copy ahead of its release date in the US, so I’ve got a head start. It’s looking good so far, although I’m so overwhelmed with work this week I might be a little slow getting through it — I’m the biology coordinator this year, and we’re managing a faculty search this week — but once I’m done, I’ll post a more thorough review.

If you’d like to pre-order it and send a message to publishers that you value this kind of quality science content in contrast to the deluge of racist dreck we usually get, click on the book cover below.

Never underestimate insects

Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia are being hit hard by massive clouds of locusts — would you believe a mass of insects 37 x 25 miles in area sweeping across East Africa? And that’s only one of multiple swarms.

Also troubling — this is a side-effect of climate change.

The swarms are reaching such an unusual size now because of cyclones that rained on the deserts of Oman last year, the FAO’s senior locust forecasting officer Keith Cressman tells Reuters’ Nita Bhalla.

“We know that cyclones are the originators of swarms – and in the past 10 years, there’s been an increase in the frequency of cyclones in the Indian Ocean,” Cressman tells Reuters. Eight cyclones occurred in 2019.

“Normally there’s none, or maybe one. So this is very unusual,” Cressman says. “It’s difficult to attribute to climate change directly, but if this trend of increased frequency of cyclones in Indian Ocean continues, then certainly that’s going to translate to an increase in locust swarms in the Horn of Africa.”

I used to raise Schistocerca, and they are amazingly, scarily prolific when given good conditions, which is what these cyclones are providing.

They’re going to need a lot of spiders — big spiders. Locusts are impressively large and well-armored.