That is not a spider

Grrr. The CBC got me excited with a headline about “the granddaddy of spiders”. It’s not a spider. It’s a Cambrian chelicerate, which ought to be cool news enough without pretending it’s some kind of familiar organism. At least it wasn’t SciTech, which called it a frightening 500-million year old predator” or LiveScience, which called it a “nightmare creature”. C’mon, people. It was a couple of centimeters long. I do not like this pop sci nonsense that has to jack up the significance of a discovery by pretending it was scary. Does this look scary to you?

a–c, Reconstructions. a, Lateral view. b, Dorsal view (the gut has been removed for clarity). c, Isolated trunk exopod. an, anus; lam, lamellae.

At least the article by the discoverers is sensible. This is an early Cambrian chelicerate with those big old feeding appendages at the front of the head (which spiders also have) and with modified limb appendages that resemble book lungs (also a spider trait), but they are most definitely not spiders. They are their own beautiful clade, and cousins of Mollisonia plenovenatrix might have been spider ancestors, but calling them spiders is like excavating an ancient fish and calling it a mammal. Very misleading.

Yes, I’m being pedantic. It matters. Let’s not diminish the diverse chelicerates by calling them spider wanna-bes.

Here’s the abstract for the paper.

The chelicerates are a ubiquitous and speciose group of animals that has a considerable ecological effect on modern terrestrial ecosystems—notably as predators of insects and also, for instance, as decomposers. The fossil record shows that chelicerates diversified early in the marine ecosystems of the Palaeozoic era, by at least the Ordovician period. However, the timing of chelicerate origins and the type of body plan that characterized the earliest members of this group have remained controversial. Although megacheirans have previously been interpreted as chelicerate-like, and habeliidans (including Sanctacaris) have been suggested to belong to their immediate stem lineage, evidence for the specialized feeding appendages (chelicerae) that are diagnostic of the chelicerates has been lacking. Here we use exceptionally well-preserved and abundant fossil material from the middle Cambrian Burgess Shale (Marble Canyon, British Columbia, Canada) to show that Mollisonia plenovenatrix sp. nov. possessed robust but short chelicerae that were placed very anteriorly, between the eyes. This suggests that chelicerae evolved a specialized feeding function early on, possibly as a modification of short antennules. The head also encompasses a pair of large compound eyes, followed by three pairs of long, uniramous walking legs and three pairs of stout, gnathobasic masticatory appendages; this configuration links habeliidans with euchelicerates (‘true’ chelicerates, excluding the sea spiders). The trunk ends in a four-segmented pygidium and bears eleven pairs of identical limbs, each of which is composed of three broad lamellate exopod flaps, and endopods are either reduced or absent. These overlapping exopod flaps resemble euchelicerate book gills, although they lack the diagnostic operculum. In addition, the eyes of M. plenovenatrix were innervated by three optic neuropils, which strengthens the view that a complex malacostracan-like visual system might have been plesiomorphic for all crown euarthropods. These fossils thus show that chelicerates arose alongside mandibulates as benthic micropredators, at the heart of the Cambrian explosion.

I think this diagram illustrates the relationship of M. plenoventrix to spiders well.

a, Simplified consensus tree of a Bayesian analysis of panarthropod relationships. This tree is based on a matrix of 100 taxa and 267 characters. Extant taxa are in blue; dashed branches represent questionable groupings. Asterisk shows that the radiodontans resolved as paraphyletic. This analysis excludes pycnogonids, but this had little effect on the topology. The letters A to D at the basal panchelicerate nodes refer to boxes on the right, and summarize the appearances of major morpho-anatomical features: (1) extension of cephalic shield, including a seventh tergite; (2) cephalic limbs all co-opted for raptorial and masticatory functions, and reduction of some trunk endopods; (3) dissociation of the exopod from the main limb branch; (4) presence of chelicerae; (5) trunk exopods made of several overlapping lobes; (6) some cephalic limbs differentiated as uniramous walking legs; (7) multi-lobate exopod covered by sclerite (operculum); (8) reduction of seventh cephalic appendage pair; and (9) all post-frontal cephalic limb pairs are uniramous walking legs. b, Life reconstruction. Drawing by J. Liang, copyright Royal Ontario Museum

Not a spider, but still cute and adorable.

Aria C, Caron J-B (2019) A middle Cambrian arthropod with chelicerae and proto-book gills. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1525-4.

The MIT Media Lab is going to be getting some intense scrutiny

The Chronicle of Higher Education has now noticed Caleb Harper’s “Food Computer”. It’s a long article, and a good chunk of it focuses on the novel funding setup MIT has for the Media Lab — it’s basically a semi-autonomous unit set loose to harvest money from rich people (that’s the good part) with relatively little oversight on the quality of the work done with that money (the bad part). So while some people are screaming “You accepted money from pedophile!”, others are now yelling “And you spent it on WHAT?!!?“.

If I were employed by the Media Lab, I’d be scrambling to update my CV and apply for jobs that would allow me to run away before someone wrote a revealing article about my project to teach spiders how to solder circuit boards … which hasn’t worked once, but boy howdy did Silicon Valley like my idea of replacing small Asian children with even cheaper spiders.

Hey, isn’t that what science is supposed to be all about, skimming creamy rich money off our excess of gullible, over-hyped tech billionaires? That’s what the MIT Media Lab was all about anyway. It’s Harper’s turn to be exposed and ridiculed, but I’m wondering what other fantasy-land projects were cooking over there.

But let’s give Caleb Harper a chance to defend himself.

Harper’s optimism helps raise money, and without money he won’t be able to see this dream of an international network of food computers come true. His critics, he said, “are basically jealous because I raise a lot of funding while giving away knowledge for free.” Harper also said that he doesn’t mislead the public. He’s explained his progress in great detail in a series of Medium posts, he said. Some may have misinterpreted his vision as current reality, he said, but if they listened closely they would not be mistaken. “Can you email a tomato to someone today? No,” he said. “Did I say that in my TED talk? Yes. Did I say it was today? No. I said, you will be able to email a tomato.”

It’s true that Harper didn’t quite say that food computers can email tomatoes or apples, though you could be forgiven for thinking exactly that. He frequently leaves the impression that the project has achieved, or is on the brink of achieving, an enormous breakthrough. It’s a style that has attracted the sort of high-profile attention, not to mention corporate funding, that fuels projects at the MIT Media Lab, and his willingness to showcase food computers beset with problems feels consistent with Ito’s “deploy or die” philosophy.

So his dream is to be able to email a tomato (or more precisely, a set of instructions to a “food computer” that will allow it to replicate the exact growing conditions for a specific tomato), so he’s doing this fun thing of making an extravagant claim (“email a tomato”) while simultaneously admitting that he can’t, and is building boxes that allow him to fake emailing a tomato. It reminds me of Fritz Leiber’s SF story, “Poor Superman”, about a scientology-like cult that invents wild stories of colonies on Mars and super-technology, knowing they’re false, but justifying them by saying they have to pretend to convince people to implement the reality.

Here’s the final word from a real working crop scientist on this story:

She also labels this approach “Sugar Daddy Science”, in which you just have to court an ignorant patron to siphon off money into your pocket for your bad ideas.

Tsk.

I wonder about this all the time!

Well, not specifically Buckingham Palace, though…

Original by Hannah Hillam

I go into some ramshackle old garage on some rental property that was probably built in the 1940s, and I wonder when the spiders first colonized it, and how much turnover there is in spider populations, and if there is a pattern of expansion and contraction in some families of spiders in a neighborhood. So yeah, exactly the same.

Spider identification agonies. Species are lies.

Spider taxonomy drives me cross-eyed. Today I was working on sorting egg sacs, tearing them away from their mommies, who don’t like that one bit — they’re very protective. I’m learning to tell the different species apart without a microscope. For instance, Steatoda triangulosa has a distinctive zig-zag of pigment on their abdomen that looks like a row of triangles from above, and they also have nearly spherical egg sacs that are white, have a fluffy surface, and are often semi-transparent. Parasteatoda, on the other hand, has an irregular mottling that sometimes looks roughly stripey, and their egg sacs are football-shaped, beige, and have an opaque leathery/papery surface (there are two species of Parasteatoda around here, P. tepidariorum and P. tabulata, which I haven’t learned to distinguish — it requires careful scrutiny of their genitalia — and my live spiders refuse to sit still long enough to poke around their private parts). Those are my rules, they’re what helps me figure out who is what.

So today I’m parting Lyanna from her egg sac…here’s Lyanna:

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Disgusting

The Mirror has an article on a man who claims to have been so severely bitten by spiders that he can’t work. You probably don’t want to read it: it’s mainly lots of close-up, full-color photos of oozing, infected wounds full of pus, and it’s going to horrify and sicken most people. There is one photo of a large false widow, but there is no connection between it and the person’s injuries, and I have to suspect something else is going on here.

The man and his son have multiple lesions all over their legs…how? These are solitary spiders, mostly, and they have no interest in biting people. One bite, I could believe; if you rolled over in bed on one, crushing it, it might bite in self-defense. But numerous bites? This makes no sense. Ticks, bedbugs, that sort of nasty beastie that actually feeds on humans, I could see, especially since those kinds of bites are recurrent and prone to infection.

This is not the first time I’ve seen the UK tabloids freaking out about spider invasions. What’s going on over there? Is this a symptom of rising xenophobia? Can I expect US tabloids to start inventing lurid stories of evil spiders killing people in their beds?

Gilly’s breakfast

I know what you’re all saying: I haven’t been posting as many spider photos lately. Guilty as charged. In my defense, classes have started up, and I’m busier, and I’ve already got grading to do, and I’ve got all these students, and…

OK, you don’t want to hear about it. So this morning I fed a few of the spiders and tried to get some action shots.

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We can all do something

Yesterday was Morris’s Prairie Pioneer Days parade, one of those small town events where local people cruise slowly down main street to praise small town virtues, like, you know, royalty.

Or local businesses.

(The restaurant Mi Mexico had the best float, I think: gorgeous costumes, people dancing, great music. Mostly what we had was some guy in a pickup truck with a sign glued to the side.)

UMM was represented.

I had joined with some of our students who were marching to advertise a climate action event. This was their float.

I know, it was a little green wagon that they pulled down the street. We were surrounded by the local Chevy dealership, our regional Republican assholes (Jeff Backer and Torrey Westrom) and these guys:

It was kind of creepy, actually, that while we were waiting in the pre-parade lineup, these guys were sitting in their truck, staring at us, looking like they wanted to teach us a lesson or two. We ignored them, and just had a grand time going down the street handing out candy to kids and giving them flyers about our plans.

And what where those plans? I think a lot of young people are inspired by Greta Thunberg, who has said “Our house is on fire – let’s act like it.” They’re planning a Global Climate Strike, with our own implementation here, with a West Central MN Climate Strike. They want us to go on a general strike, just shutting down all that we can (especially classes) on 19-20 September.

I can do that. I will do that. Will you?

Do it for the youth.

Prophets of Doom vs. Scientists with a Plan

Jonathan Franzen is wildly incoherent. He’s written this terrible mess of a piece that veers between “We’re doomed, climate change is unstoppable, trying will bankrupt us” to “gosh, won’t it be great when civilization collapses and the survivors are living on love and peace?”, and it’s infuriatingly bad. All you need to know is that he explains his method for scrying the future.

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe.

The editors at the New Yorker should have read that and realized, by his own admission, Franzen is a crank, and that publishing this crap would be an embarrassment, and they should have pulled the plug. Franzen, though, is a Famous Author, a fact that impresses the New Yorker unduly and leads to a failure of judgment.

I think I’ll get my information from real scientists who actually use data to arrive at their conclusions, like Michael Mann, who published this article, Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial, two years ago.

The evidence that climate change is a serious challenge that we must tackle now is very clear. There is no need to overstate it, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness. Some seem to think that people need to be shocked and frightened to get them to engage with climate change. But research shows that the most motivating emotions are worry, interest and hope. Importantly, fear does not motivate, and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.

It is important to communicate both the threat and the opportunity in the climate challenge. Those paying attention are worried, and should be, but there are also reasons for hope. The active engagement of many cities, states and corporations, and the commitments of virtually every nation (minus one) is a very hopeful sign. The rapid movement in the global energy market towards cleaner options is another. Experts are laying out pathways to avoid disastrous levels of climate change and clearly expressing the urgency of action. There is still time to avoid the worst outcomes, if we act boldly now, not out of fear, but out of confidence that the future is largely in our hands.

There is a huge difference between “This is a huge problem, resign yourself to defeat” and “This is a huge problem, we’re going to have to work very hard to overcome it.” Who are you going to listen to, a competent and credentialed scientist in an appropriate field, or a crankypants author with weird ideas about underwear?

You know, the biggest change you can implement right now is to throw the science denialists out of political office. Get to work on that, then we can start implementing changes that would help.

Them goofy city-folk and their weird ideas

It’s a bad day for the MIT Media Lab. Hot off the resignation of their corrupt leader, Business Insider breaks a bizarre story that sounds a bit like the Theranos story: a non-functional technology turns out to have been pumped up with fake data and even faker promises. It’s something called The Personal Food Computer, which was going to revolutionize agriculture. Or maybe just urban agriculture. Or maybe just impress city-boys (excuse me: “nerdfarmers”. That’s what they actually call them) who have never seen a farm.

It’s a plastic box with some widgets under control of a computer that watch temperature and pH and lighting and spritz a plant inside it with water and nutrients. Just think, no dirt, and a computer will make sure it gets watered if you forget, and at the end of a few weeks or months, you find food inside the box, maybe a sprig of basil or a tomato! This box, and your hypothetical tomato, will only cost you about $500 to build and take up a desktop in your apartment.

(I literally groaned at Harper’s naive babbling about genetics, I’m afraid.)

Am I alone in thinking this idea, even if it worked, was ridiculously stupid? I’m living in the Midwest, in the midst of farm country. When I drive to the big city of Minneapolis, I pass through about 150 miles where all I see on either side of me is corn and soybeans, each individual plant of negligible value, growing with negligible individual care (in aggregate, it’s expensive in time and labor), without computers tweaking each plant along. It’s what plants do. Farmers don’t have the time or money to nurse each 1m2 of cropland along with personal attention and a dedicated computer. I don’t understand the point of this gadget at all. My wife planted a little circular garden in our backyard, maybe 5 meters in diameter, and right now I’m buried in somewhere around 50kg of tomatoes.

This box is the most useless over-hyped technology ever. I wonder how much Jeffrey Epstein invested in it?

That’s assuming it worked. Surprise! It doesn’t!

The “personal food computer,” a device that MIT Media Lab senior researcher Caleb Harper presented as helping thousands of people across the globe grow custom, local food, simply doesn’t work, according to two employees and multiple internal documents that Business Insider viewed. One person asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

They had to salt their demos with plants bought elsewhere. Even the one use I could imagine for them, as educational tools in schools, flopped.

In the Spring of 2017, Cerqueira was part of a pilot program that delivered three of Harper’s devices to local schools in the Boston area. Initially, the idea was for the students to put the devices together themselves. But Cerqueira said that didn’t work — the devices were too complex for the students to construct on their own.

“They weren’t able to build them,” Cerqueira said.

In response, Cirque’s team sent three MIT Media Lab staff to set up the computers for them. Of the three devices the staff members tried to setup, only one was able to grow plants, she said. That one stopped working after a few days, however.

When Cerqueira and her coworkers would visit the school, students would joke that the plants they were growing in plastic cups were growing better than the ones in the personal food computers, she said. The pilot ended shortly thereafter.

On another occasion, her team sent two dozen of the devices to classrooms across greater Boston as part of a curriculum being designed by one of MIT Media Lab’s education partners.

“It’s fair to say that of the 30-ish food computers we sent out, at most two grew a plant,” Cerqueira said.

I like that there plastic cup with dirt technology. I’ve done that. It works. Cheap, too. Maybe “nerdfarmers” should try investing in that.

MIT isn’t exactly basking in glory lately. It’s a shame.