Yay!

Soon enough, I’m going to be up to my ass in baby black widows.

We were strolling in the garden, and noticed that the place was full of horny pollinators. If they weren’t eating, they were fornicating.

It was like hanging out with teenagers. And I thought, if this was a 70s teen horror movie, what should I see next? And I was right.

If I were a spider, I’d want to just hang out in flowers and wait for those obnoxious teenagers to stop by. It’s the perfect place to find distracted prey.

Look what’s lurking in your flowers.

I got some crickets today, and it’s clear that that’s what black widows prefer to eat. Here’s the view one minute after tossing a cricket into their lair.

Yes, I have a skull in the container. For drama.

It was a quick death. The cricket bumbled about, bumping into the thicket of silk strands throughout the space, and the spider scuttled down, gave it one quick bite, and the battle was over. The spider is near the top center of the photo, with the motionless belly of the dead cricket below it, in the jungle of moss. It tried to hide, a futile effort given the tangle of silk everywhere and the potency of the venom.

I didn’t expect it, but wow, black widows are incredibly lazy. They find a corner and park their large butts there and don’t move at all, all day long. I know they wander about at night stringing silk all over the place, but otherwise, they’re like sulking teenagers who don’t wanna do nothin’ whenever you look at them. Boring!

Or are they?

I think maybe I haven’t been feeding them right. Yesterday, I caught a small grasshopper in our garden, and I tossed it into the black widow container. It bounced off a couple of strands of silk, and the effect was electric: the widow leapt out of her corner and stood poised in the center, suspended on its web, looking extraordinarily alert. She wasn’t looking directly at the hopper, but was delicately touching multiple lines — you could tell she was poised to sense any motion in her trap.

The moment was tense and dramatic.

The hopper moved. The widow instantly charged at it, tried to use her hind legs to tangle it up, and failed, so she retreated back to her central lookout. The hopper was terrified, and remained motionless for at least 5 minutes, while the spider was also motionless, but alert.

Finally, the hopper took a small step, and the widow surged forward and snared it with more silk. The hopper was kicking frantically, trying to leap away, but was hampered by the strong sticky silk, and every leap tangled it further in all that silk. So much silk. Finally, the black widow gave it one little kiss, and the hopper was almost instantly dead. Then she dragged her prey up to her calm quiet corner and ate.

I’ve been feeding her mealworms all this time. Maybe it’s not the spider that’s boring, but the food I’ve been giving her. The next feeding day is Tuesday, I think I’m going to have to buy a box of crickets.

I saw this and had to stick my head in a grungy, stinky box to take this photo.

See it? There was a mama Parasteatoda tending her egg sac. Right there in the middle! You can’t miss it.

I scooped it up, and will be taking it into the lab. Maybe this is easier to see?

The spiders are laying eggs all over the place and tucking their sacs into odd corners all around the yard and the house. It’s like an easter egg hunt!

I didn’t tell you the whole story about our local Argiope. In fact, I cropped the photo I used by a lot — I left out that spider’s consort. Here’s the whole thing.

The female is on the right, that smaller, more gracile spider on the left is a male.

The thing about nephilid mating is that when the male gets lucky, one of the last things he does, once he gets his palp into the female epigyne, is to snap it off — that is, he voluntarily castrates himself and leaves the organ inside her. It acts as block to further mating by other males.

In addition, he builds a web very close to the female’s, and stations himself there to deter any males that might wander along and try courting her. That little guy in the left corner is a eunuch guard!

I know, that sounds creepy and stalkerish, and as I always tell people, the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy, so don’t take this as an example. Maybe Dolomedes is a more attractive role model: the males don’t do the eunuch guardian thing at all, they just up and die on the spot as soon as they achieve copulation, and leave their lifeless corpse dangling from the female’s nether bits until it falls off. Carrying around the dead body of former partner’s is an excellent way to get other males to leave you alone.

I don’t recommend that for human women, either. It would work, though!