What a pretty home you have!

One of the things Parasteatoda does is build cobwebs on the side of our house (yes, we have an orange house) that not only gathers bugs, but also windblown debris. They seem to like it, and will even add to it by hoisting bits of gravel and small twigs from the ground up to their nest, which will gradually become more cluttered over the course of the summer. It’s still early, so this tiny little spider mainly has scraps of flower blossoms to hide behind.

If she survives and thrives, she’ll add her egg sacs to the accretion.

I assume you can see her, just below the dark seed pod? She was hiding behind that, and I had to nudge her a bit to get her to come out.

Spider sex orgy, coming right up

This is the week! It was a busy morning in the lab, doing a complete spider cage cleanup, shuffling everyone around, sorting out males and females, and getting ready for the big sexual event scheduled for Thursday, when the virginal boys are introduced to the virginal girls, and we hope grand things happen.

The party takes a couple of days of preparation — tomorrow is the preparatory feast day, for instance. I’ll be posting all the details on Patreon, if you’re really interested.

P.S. When searching for an image to illustrate a ‘spider sex orgy’, make sure you’ve got Safe Search on. I didn’t, and now I have to go bleach my eyeballs. So many strange images, and virtually none of them included an actual arachnid…

Spider gluttony

I was checking out our compost bin, which is swarming with young juvenile spiders, and what jumped out at me was how fat they’re getting. These little spiders are growing fast and are turning into regular whales. This one, I noticed, had a secret stash — they’d corralled a bunch of baby isopods to snack on whenever they felt peckish.

Parasteatoda

Yum. All gathered into one spot, and tender and delicious nibbles, too. No wonder they’re getting so plump.

Personally, I’m feeling well satiated right now. I scheduled one class to turn in their final assignment last night, and another class to turn in their term papers tonight. I’d rather lick isopods off a compost bin lid than read any more student papers.

I want you to know this was a challenge

A swarm of Parasteatoda have hatched out in my compost bin, and I’ve tried a few times to get decent photos of them, but it’s hard. They’re young and tiny — less than half a millimeter long — and they’re busy, scampering all over to build webs, so shooting them is tough. Also, I’m rusty from a long winter neglecting my camera.

Here’s one being spooky, its cephalothorax in shadow with just the pair of posterior median eyes visible and glowing.

I’ll keep practicing and they’ll keep growing.

The truth about spiders

The director of Infested, Sébastien Vaniček, tells the inside story of making a horror movie about spiders.

And, yes, they really did use 200 spiders on the set—but not all at once. “They are able to shoot for 10 seconds, and then after that they are tired, and you can’t have anything from them,” Vaniček explained. “You have to understand them, and understand that they are really fragile creatures. They are always afraid and they want to hide. When they are on the floor, they will run and they will seek a place in the shadow. They are able to run for about 10 seconds, and after just 10 seconds they are completely tired. You can put them on the wall and let them stay, and I can film them because I know they won’t move.”

Truth. Most spiders are laid back and placid — their whole lifestyle is about being still and quiet, and suddenly darting forward opportunistically. That might be part of the reason they scare some people, that they are capable of suddenly darting at prey, even if most of their life is spent at rest.

I’m adding Infested to my must-see list of spider movies

On the recommendation of catherwood on Discord, I had to watch this movie last night, Infested.

Eight tarsal claws up! Unless you’re arachnophobic, in which case you don’t want to get anywhere near this.

It’s pretty much the same plot as Arachnophobia: venomous spider is brought back to a city (Paris, in this case), it escapes, breeds, area is overrun with swarms of deadly spiders that require extreme measures to eradicate. The difference is that Infested has a much larger horror-fantasy element: the spiders spawn impossibly rapidly — like, catch one, next moment it erupts into a horde of tiny spiders — and the spiders grow at an impossible rate to an impossible size, so that within a day you’ve got millions of spiders, some the size of large dogs. I’ve measure spider growth rates, and generally we’re talking a few tenths of a millimeter per week, so my rational brain rejected much of the premise, but my irrational brain that tuned in to a horror movie about monster spiders was saying, “YES! Eat all the people!”

It also has a sympathetic protagonist who loves small invertebrates while hustling to keep his friends and family out of poverty, and huge host of victims living in a Parisian apartment building. There had to be a lot of them to fuel the explosion of arachnid biomass!

Sadly, it looks like the only place to catch it right now is on Shudder, but it’s worth it for the entertainment value.

Now, though, no more entertainment. I have to go sequester myself to work through a mountain of end-of-semester papers. If only I could solve that problem with a lot of precisely placed explosives…

Are all my pets psycho?

I’ve mentioned my crazy evil cat before, but here’s another of my little friends, my greenbottle blue tarantula, Blue.

They are just coming down off a massive threat posture, which is a change. For a long time, they’ve been skittish and timid. I turn on the lights in the lab, they run and hide. I rattle the door a little bit when I go to feed them, they run and hide. A shadow moves across their container, they run and hide. I figured I’d adopted a cowardly spider.

Lately, though, as they mature — I can tell by how their pigment is darkening to a deep blue from the prior orange — they’ve gotten aggressive. Now they boldly stand in the middle of their space and turn to face me when I walk up to them, but not in a friendly way. When I put a mealworm in their face, no more fleeing, but instead, they rear up on their 4 hindlegs and threaten with their forelimbs, and flash their fangs at me. I’m feeding them! Calm down!

It’s becoming a trend that any animal I take care of gets psycho hostile.

Whoa, wait…could it be me?

Springtime, and one’s thoughts turn to spider breeding

I was walking into work this morning, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the wolf spiders were underfoot, and I saw all these delicate lines of silk draped over everything (once your eye is attuned to spotting silk lines, you discover that they are everywhere, on every fence post and bush.) I stopped by the lab and saw that the temperature in the spider incubators was a comfortable 27°C, and the humidity is rising at last to about 35%, so I checked the colony. Nobody is laying eggs yet, but they are looking plump and healthy and ready for a season of fecundity.

Steatoda triangulosa

Once the semester is truly over, in about a week and a half, I’m going to be doing some matchmaking, and that lovely virgin is going to take a lover.