In addition to rescuing her stranded man from airports, Mary has been scouting around for spiders in my absence, and caught a few around the house. This is Parasteatoda tepidariorum, the species I work with in the lab, and she has gone straight into the colony.
P.tep is my favorite: so common, but so interesting.
This lovely plump Salticus scenicus was tough to photograph, it was just skittering all over the place and refused to hold still for a photo. That’s Salticus for you, though.
Perhaps you recall the majestic Larinioides I found at Pomme de Terre park almost two weeks ago? It laid a large pink egg sac in the container we had it in, as a present before we released it back into the wild.
Today, or perhaps last night, they started hatching. Here’s a baby Larinioides spiderling, freshly emerged, and looking a bit stunned.
They’re back in the incubator until I see that a few more hatch out, and then they’ll be released to the world.
Mary and I celebrated my return by going into the lab and checking around the university for more spiders. I liked this sign post with the cobwebs zig-zagging all along its length.
There will probably be more spider photos later, after I finish editing them and uploading them to iNaturalist.
I feel better already. A giant squid has been filmed in the deeps.
So beautiful and graceful. Watch how the tentacles uncoil and spread out to caress the lure, before jetting away into the darkness. That’s an image to linger in your dreams.
Teenagers are acquiring bone abnormalities from cell phone use! It’s the perfect story, combining contempt for social media and technology and young people with an apparent appropriate comeuppance for those sins.
Mobile technology has transformed the way we live — how we read, work, communicate, shop and date.
But we already know this.
What we have not yet grasped is the way the tiny machines in front of us are remolding our skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviors we exhibit but the bodies we inhabit.
New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls — bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments. The weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion.
The phenomenon is called an EEOP, or enlarged external occipital protuberance, and in a study of 1200 people, they found that about a third have this feature…and that it is more common in men and younger people. They assume from the differences in frequency at different ages that this is an emerging, recent change, which may be reasonable, but I’d like to see a better analysis of the causes.
The authors also assume that this is an undesirable change, with loaded language and an attempt to imply this feature causes serious problems.
Alarmingly, a survey of university staff and students revealed that participants spend an average of 4.65 hours/day using a hand held mobile device, and that 68% of the participating students reported neck pain.
Why is mobile device use alarming? Also note: they do not show a correlation between the presence of EEOPs and neck pain. We’re simply supposed to assume there’s a causal relationship, I guess, between exostoses and this vaguely defined term, “neck pain”. They have not shown that these bony bumps are a problem, but they are ready to raise the alarm.
Clearly, our findings should raise concern as morbidity and disability due to musculoskeletal disorders impose increasing physical, social and financial burdens on individuals and societies. Accordingly, the mitigation of poor postural habit through prevention intervention may be prudent.
Again, they have not demonstrated morbidity or disability. They’ve found that lots of people have these “bumps” that are easily detectable in x-rays, and maybe it’s because people are peering at their cell phones or playing the video games, so there must be a problem. They’ve only shown that the phenomenon exists!
To which I would point out the example used in the Washington Post article: hard work causes a healthy plastic response by your tissues, building up calluses. Are we alarmed by the growth of calluses in working people? Or do we recognize that this is a normal protective response by our bodies to environmental stresses? If you adopt an unusual posture in your work, your bones, cartilages, and tendons also mold themselves to fit.
They also show that 40% of college-age people are exhibiting this “problem”. I’d say that if it’s that common, while these same people seem to be functioning well and are actively and voluntarily engaging in the activity that putatively causes it, it probably isn’t a problem. It may also become the new normal. When over half the population expresses it, will doctors change their diagnoses and note of the new minority, “Oh, you’re missing your occipital exostosis. I’m going to recommend some physical therapy to build it up”?
Finally, one peculiarity here is that they’re jumping all over this possibly entirely benign phenomenon. Rather than focusing on college students using cell phones, I wonder what musculo-skeletal distortions are affecting people who are doing stoop labor, or other repetitive tasks in their work. Perhaps someone can put together an alarmist paper showing the plastic responses in the bones of menial laborers, expressing concern for the unfortunate spinal problems of those people. After all, if you’re horrified that students spend 5 hours a day looking at their phones, you should be experiencing raging apoplexy about farm workers spending 8-10 hours a day bent over, picking crops.
Nah, those people don’t matter.
I guess this makes me officially an arachnologist now — I have a t-shirt.
The real arachnologists are now horrified and are planning to raise their standards immediately.
Waaah. I just have the closing banquet tonight, and then tomorrow is a long travel day home. So what did I learn?
I guess that’s a pretty good outcome for a meeting, to end it inspired and better informed than I was at the beginning.
Next year AAS2020 will be held in Davis, California. I’m hoping I can fit it into my budget.
I was at dinner with a group of arachnologists last night, and I was surprised when I mentioned that I was from Minnesota and was then told that I was one of the only two arachnologists in the state. I was firstly startled at actually being told I was an arachnologist since I’m still trying to get a good grasp of the field, and secondly surprised that they’re so rare (would you believe there are only 500 people in the International Society of Arachnology?). He qualified it by saying that I was one of two people who had officially registered with the American Arachnology Society, from which I learned a few things.
If you want to be an arachnologist on paper, it’s easy — just send in your membership dues.
If you are a real arachnologist in Minnesota, with skills and expertise and deep knowledge, rather than a wanna-be like me, you’re behind. Send in your membership dues. Otherwise, people will keep mistaking me for you.
Otherwise, if you want to become a real arachnologist, here’s an article on the subject. It recommends starting in childhood and your teenage years, which is a little worrisome, since I waited until I was 61 to start. But you can do it! Unfortunately, unlike being an arachnologist on paper, it’s going to take a lot of hard work.
This meeting is really an exercise in attitude readjustment. I’ve been steeped in the zebrafish world for so long that I’ve unconsciously held the model organism perspective — here’s my animal, all I have to do is query it deeply with increasingly thorough techniques, and I shall understand biology. Now I’m in a world where every observation is tested against a dozen closely related species, and a dozen distantly related species, and a dozen outgroups that aren’t even in the same order, and everyone is sprawling out horizontally to get a feel for the dimension of a problem rather than digging down vertically into one convenient animal bred specifically to thrive in the artificial environment of the lab. It feels strange and sometimes uncomfortable.
I’m also sometimes totally lost. I was at a session yesterday where arachnologists were just projecting photos from their personal collections, and where I was content to just think “OK, I guess that’s a spider”, other people were shouting out latin names and recognizing old friends. Or worse, “here’s a spider I haven’t been able to identify, and I consulted the world’s foremost expert, and they had never seen it before either”, and it begins to sink in that we’re surrounded by an immensely diverse population that is so wild and weird that we have no idea who they all are, and that I’m going to have to do a lot of work to catch up. It is intellectually terrifying and bizarrely stimulating.
Every once in a while, fortunately, I find something to anchor myself. Yesterday was all about spider silk, which, on the one hand, is molecular biology and can be reduced to genes and physical interactions with the environment (adhesive droplets on webs are a product of self-assembly, contingent on things like humidity and temperature), but on the other hand, of course spiders produce an incredible diversity of different kinds of silk. Sometimes, it all gets to be a bit much.
Looking at the program, this morning is all about biogeography, diversity, evolution, ecology, and life history, while this afternoon is all about behavior. I’m pretty sure my brain will explode at some point today, because I can assure you that there won’t be any single principle that I’ll be able to condense everything down to.
