I’m no longer preggers — I’m a papa!

Remember when I said I was preggers, and that I had a little transparent container on my desk I was watching? Yesterday I had noticed that the mama spider was rather agitated, and was fussing about with her egg sac, and I was getting worried that something was going wrong. I shouldn’t have worried! This afternoon while I was watching the AAS talks, I noticed some new tiny little dots near the sac — the babies have emerged! They are very cute. You’ll have to check them out on Instagram!

What you’re missing today

The Tuesday schedule from the American Arachnology Society meeting:

I’m really looking forward to the plenary, and I know there will be lots of good stuff in the contributed talks, but boy, those were fatiguing yesterday. Also one session did not keep very good time, went way overlong, and rode right over the one break. Hey, coordinators, it’s really important to keep everything on time, otherwise when am I going to get to void all the coffee I was drinking through the meeting?

Also, the informal evening sessions are useful for us amateurs. I’m planning to sit in on the spider husbandry happy hour.

I’m preggers!

As you can see from my desktop — my real desktop, not the virtual one on my computer screen.

Don’t be distracted by my dirty keyboard (I’ve had it for about 15 years). What’s important is that cube with the rainbow reflection on it, which contains a Parasteatoda mama and her egg sac. I’ve got it front and center so I can keep a constant eye on it — I want to catch the babies the instant they emerge, and I’ve got my camera at the ready right next to me.

Here’s my gender reveal party: it’s going to be a boy! And a boy! And a girl! And another boy, and a girl, and a girl, girl, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl, girl, girl, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl…etc. I won’t need any fireworks because when that thing pops there will be a cloud of baby spiders all ballooning outwards, and if I opened it at the wrong time I could fill my office with spiders drifting everywhere. That would be delightful, but instead I’ll be trying to capture them all individually and put them in vials to provide more troops for my spider army.

I’m hoping they don’t emerge until after Wednesday, because I’m deep into this conference for a while. From past experience, though, babies are always picking the most inconvenient time…

Proper decorum when spotting a spider during an arachnology meeting

There’s a major added benefit to attending a virtual conference. I’ll be spending the next 5 days ‘attending’ the American Arachnological Society meeting, which really means sitting in my home office listening to voices over my headphones with images of data about spiders on my computer screen, and the advantage is that I can be distracted without disrupting the event. Last night I was tuned into Maydianne Andrade’s excellent talk about widows and sex variation, and this critter was scampering over the windowsill.

[Sorry, you know the drill: the photo is on Instagram or Patreon]

So I got up, grabbed a collecting vial, scooped it up, and snapped a couple of photos right in the middle of her talk. There were about 180 arachnologists listening to it online; imagine if they each spotted a spider during a meeting, and felt no restraint about indulging their passion right then and there. Chaos! The entire audience would be on their hands & knees, or climbing the walls!

It would be great!

Maybe not as productive information-wise, though.

Also, there was a tiny theridiid spinning a web on my microphone stand. I got it, too, but it’s so small I think I’ll need to bring it into the lab to look at it with the microscope.

Are you on Team Snake, or Team Spider?

I know which side I’m on — the winning side, and that would be the spiders. Here’s a whole photo essay of spiders killing snakes. It’s a real David vs. Goliath matchup, and it seems the little guy (who is often Latrodectus — I really have to get some of those in my lab) typically wins. As the article says, “there are no recorded instances of a snake successfully biting and injecting venom into a spider.”

To be fair, though, that’s probably because of the gross mismatch in size. Spider kills a snake, sits on it for days trying to suck the juices out of it; snake kills a spider, chomp, gulp, it’s done and gone in a few seconds, providing fewer opportunities for a photo op.

A triumphant moment in history

Today I was surprised to learn that there was one time — one time only — that Charlie Brown managed to kick the football, and it was thanks to Spider-Man.

This is what radioactive spider bites were intended for.

Suddenly, meetings

Nothing for a year, and suddenly I’ve got two meetings at once this week. The big one is the annual meeting of the American Arachnological Society, which begins on Thursday and continues until the following Wednesday. It’s a virtual meeting (I think registration is still open, and it’s cheap at $20) so it’ll be almost a week of nothing but spider talk on a fairly loose and casual schedule. I am so looking forward to it.

And then, on Sunday, I’m going to have to skip an online poster session because — hold on to your hats, this is unbelievable — I’ve been invited to speak to the Atheists of Florida. An atheist meeting? Do they still have those? And they invited me? Don’t they know who I am? Sheesh. A fellow works hard to destroy the whole atheist movement and a few years later they all forget.

Anyway, they probably think they’re safe, since I’ll be talking about science. Little do they know, my topic is the biology of intelligence, and one of the things I’ll be doing is taking apart atheist buzzwords, like “rationality” and “reason” and “logic” and “intelligence” by explaining how spiders, and other animals, are also logical and intelligent, and are probably better atheists than humans, since none of them have any need for that god hypothesis.

Expect schisms, rifts, and recriminations all across Florida after my poisonous spirit touches the state. It’s what I do.