It’s been a fecund kind of day

We spent the afternoon largely engaged in moving our Parasteatoda females into larger, roomier quarters, using 5.7L Sterilyte containers, and then cutting up cardboard boxes to make frames inside the containers for them to build on. We discovered that the 10-can mini-can pop cases were exactly the right size to fit inside, so we zipped over to the grocery store and purchased way too many cases, just so we could get the cardboard. I bought most of it for my research student, who requested Mountain Dew — he’s sharing the bounty with his roommates, so it will be all my fault if a swarm of college students wired on caffeine rampage through the town tonight.

Yesterday, Mary and I went to Pomme de Terre Park, and has been our custom, prowled around looking for spiders. We found a magnificent Larinioides living in a tin shed down by the river, and caught it and brought it home. Look at it! It’s huge and beautiful!
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New spider housing!

I got some excellent suggestions from Nicholas DiRienzo for raising spiders, which is why it’s good to get information online, and also why I’m going to the American Arachnology Society conference this weekend. You can get started with reading stuff, but there’s no substitute for hearing it straight from the experts.

We checked out the couples we’d put together in larger spaces yesterday, and sadly, I caught one in the act of cannibalism…poor guy. We separated them. Then I rummaged in my collection of zebrafish containers, and found some 5.7L Sterilyte containers, a bit smaller than Dr DiRienzo recommended, but we’ll give them a try. We moved a few females into them right away so they can start getting used to the expanded digs. We’re going to also add some cardboard liners, once we find a box that fits.

I was initially daunted about the space required — it was appealing to just have oodles of spiders in a small incubator — but once I started stacking these things, I realized I could pack maybe as many as 50 females into the space I’d previously used for my zebrafish setup. Sorry, fishies, it’s now an arachnid facility.

My summer student, Preston Fifarek, has wisely chosen to name the female spiders after characters from Game of Thrones. Males are going to get Lord of the Rings names. I’ll be interested to see how well Cersei takes to Bilbo.

My day is all booked up already

I have plans, so many plans.

First, I’m going into the lab to examine yesterday’s handiwork. We attempted to breed two pairs of spiders yesterday, moving them into two different kinds of larger chambers. My concern is that the vials we keep them in are too small for two spiders and that one of the reasons I’m seeing so much cannibalism of the males is because of overcrowding. If all goes well, I’ll find two females and two live males today. If that works, I’m going to turn my incubator into a fornucopia and pair up all the males with mates. I’d like, for a change, to have more embryos than I know what to do with.

Then we’re surveying some more garages. I’ve arbitrarily set a one week window for data collection in June, so that will be done tomorrow.

This afternoon I have to transcribe all the data into my computer — right now I’ve got a pile of folders and scribblings on paper for each site. I’m keeping paper records of everything (hey, election officials — it’s a good idea!), but I’ve got to get it organized in one place so I can wrap my head around it.

One of the things I have to sort out is some of the bigger picture data. I’m being scrupulous about data privacy — every site is encoded on a master list, and then the individual site data is stored without direct reference to the homeowners (which is good, I planned ahead thinking people might not want it known how many spiders occupy their property), but now I’m seeing glimmerings of interesting spatial distributions of species. I might want to make a map at some point.

In some ways, the data so far is kind of boring. Because we restricted ourselves to one narrow kind of environment, garages and sheds, we’re seeing the same beasties everywhere: Pholcus and Steatoda and Parasteatoda. That’s good for our sanity, because we’re brand new at this spider game, so reducing the number of taxa we have to master simplifies everything. We know, though, that there are hundreds of species around here, and we only occasionally see an orb weaver or funnel web spider or ground spider in these dusty musty cobwebby garages. We might want to think about sampling other sites in the future.

For instance, houses around Lake Crystal here in town have been stunning when we walk up to knock on the front door — the houses are covered in webs, there are swarms of mosquitos and mayflies everywhere, we start out convinced that this place is going to a time-consuming nightmare to sort out. Then we walk into the garage, and dang, it’s nothing but Theridiidae and Pholcidae again, and not particularly rich in them, either. We’re focused on these sheltered mini-environments while there’s a riot going on outside. Maybe at some point, if I get a student interested in that sort of thing, we’ll just stake out an area on the lakeshore and go centimeter by centimeter through that more complex space.

Right now, though, just the relationships between these few species in our limited environment are going to take a while to puzzle out. Garages are either infested with Pholcus or Parasteatoda, but mixed distributions are less common. Will we see shifts over the summer? Do the pholcids, known predators of other spiders, gradually take over? Is there something in the environment that favors one species over another?

We’re also seeing some interesting granularity in the species distribution, which is one reason I’m thinking of mapping. We find Parasteatoda tepidariorum everywhere, it’s probably the most common spider in these sites. But then we found one house that was all S. triangularis, and two widely separated houses with lots of S. borealis. Just chance? Are there little enclaves of these species, like ethnic neighborhoods, that persist over time? If we go door-knocking and check other houses in these neighborhoods, will we find larger patterns?

I haven’t even started on the lab studies. Once we get steady production of embryos, we’re going to start with some simple studies of the effect of temperature on rate of development, seeing if we can induce diapause, that sort of thing, all with the aim of figuring out how spiders survive living in a place where temperatures drop to -20°C every winter. My summer months are split with one week of taxonomic studies to three weeks in the lab, so that’s actually going to take up more of our time soon.

I feel like I’m getting sucked down into a spider hole. It’s delightful! I recommend it! You should all join us down here!

You think spiders are weird? At least I’m not working on turkeys.

Those birds are creepy.

They began with a taxidermically prepared female turkey model and a pen of active males. In order to learn what specifically gets a turkey visually interested in making more turkeys, the two men slowly removed parts of the turkey model, one by one. They detached the feet, the wings, and eventually the entire body of the taxidermied turkey until the stick-mounted head and neck, held like the grimmest puppet, remained.

In their paper “Stimulae Eliciting Sexual Behavior” the scientists write: “Male turkeys presented a body without the head displayed but did not mount. Presenting the head alone (upright) released display behavior followed by ‘mounting’ and copulatory movements immediately posterior to the head.”

That’s a bit of evidence that bozo defending the missionary position didn’t consider. See? Turkey faces are a potent visual stimulus to other turkeys, even when decapitated and impaled on a stick.

I don’t understand how non-vegetarians can even bear to eat those things.

My house: ground zero in the Northern Empire of Spiders

We were out spider-huntin’ again today, adding more data to the collection, and finding this Steatoda, which is about as big as they get. We’ve captured a couple of representatives of this species now, but they’re all female.

We limit the number we capture to one or two a day, because we don’t want to perturb the local populations too much. I’m only planning to breed Parasteatoda tepidariorum, though, so I’m going to have to do something with the other species we find…I’m probably going to release them all at my house, since I did so much collecting here that the population is hopelessly messed up already, which may turn my house into a weird little hotbed of exotic spider diversity.

I wonder if that will increase the property value? It should.

What paleo diet?

I keep hearing about this imaginary paleolithic diet, and I wonder how they know, and also find it strange that there was apparently one people a 100,000 years ago, and they all ate the same things. Everything about it seems wrong.

Now there is some evidence that humans were roasting starchy tubers in their caves.

Based on plants that would have been locally available, Stone Age people likely cooked tubers and roots in the cave, the scientists say. Compared with raw starchy plants, their cooked counterparts would have provided an especially efficient source of glucose, and thus energy, to people. Human fossils previously found in the coastal cave, located at Africa’s southern tip, also date to around 120,000 years ago.

Ancient starch eating at Klasies River Cave supports the possibility that Homo sapiens evolved genetic upgrades to help with digesting hard-to-break-down starch long before people started farming starchy crops in Africa around 10,000 years ago. Scientists have determined that people today carry more copies of starch-digestion genes than did Stone Age populations, such as Neandertals and Denisovans.

Ancient humans in southern Africa likely ate a mix of cooked roots and tubers, shellfish, fish and game animals, Larbey’s team says. Roots and tubers would have been available year-round. And while little is known about the origins of cooking, campfires were being built at least 300,000 years ago in Africa.

Well, maybe there is something to this paleo diet stuff, because I started salivating. I don’t have any shellfish or game, but I’m thinking now that dinner tonight might be some roasted tubers seasoned with some of the herbs my wife is growing in her garden. Our many-times-great grandparents weren’t stupid people. We might as well give those starch-digestion enzymes they bestowed on us a happy workout!

Class Photo

Today was lab cleanup and organization day. I had the spider colony line up for their class photo.

You can see it’s still a small group — we’re just beginning to rebound from a long, quiet, male-less winter. I’m hoping to expand the colony to four or five times that size in the next few weeks, which I think will be sustainably self-perpetuating at that point.

To that end, those few males in the group are getting a little nervous — tomorrow is their wedding day. The lucky ladies are licking their chops. I’m hoping to minimize the likelihood of patriarchal mortality by transferring pairs to large, roomy honeymoon containers where the guys have a chance of running away.

Another day, more spiders

This is my life right now: running around town, barging into people’s garages, peering into musty corners with my headgear, scooping up the occasional spider. Sorry. I’m going to be even more boring than usual for a while.

Today we surveyed a few more houses, including one that had no visible spiders at all — we found a few cobwebs, so we knew they were hiding somewhere in there, but no one was coming out to play. We were disappointed. The homeowners seemed pleased.

We also found one garage with multiple orb weavers, all very tiny and very young. This isn’t the usual place we expect to find orb webs.

Also found: Steatoda triangularis, with their pretty black & white diamond pattern.

scale=1mm

Tomorrow I’m doing lab work, then a few more days of field work before we stop for the month, and then next weekend I’m off to the American Arachnological Society meeting to hang out with some real arachnologists. Am I immersed in spiderology nowadays? I think so.

Another day of spider-hunting!

We spent another day rummaging about in strangers’ garages, working up a dirty sweat and getting spider webs in our faces. It was great fun! We doubled the size of our data set, so that’s the big news.

The other fun thing is that while mostly the data is repetitive — most garages around here are full of Pholcidae or familiar ol’ Parasteatoda tepidariorum — it’s neat when find a different population. We’re seeing the same species of Theridiidae everywhere, but we walked into one shed today and it was different. Theridiidae, sure, this shed contained only Steatoda borealis. These guys, with many teeny tiny recent hatchlings:

We’re going back here in July to see if that population retains its grip.

Uh-oh. Ticks.

It’s going to be another day delving deep into more spidery domains, and then I see this news about another threat, a new species of tick invading the US.

Testing in New York identified the tick as an Asian longhorned tick nymph, with genetic sequencing adding more evidence affirming the finding. The National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, further confirmed the finding.

Tick sampling using corduroy drag cloths found Asian longhorned ticks on the patient’s manicured lawn, some of them in direct sun. More were found in the park across the street from the patient’s house, both in open, cut grass exposed to direct sun and in taller, shaded grass next to the woods. Testing also found ticks on a nearby public trail, in mowed short and midlength grass near the trail edge, both in full sun and partial shade. The discovery of the ticks near the man’s house were the first known collections in New York state.

The authors wrote that finding the ticks on manicured lawns and in open sun may be significant, because public education efforts often stress that Ixodes scapularis ticks—the most common biting tick in New York state—are found in wooded areas or shaded grass.

At least my area of interest right now is dark, shadowy, dusty, cobwebby, and hot, so I’m not going to panic. My long-term plans include expanding into lawns and gardens, though, so I’ll keep this in mind for next year.