You need to include a scale with these images, Riley Black!
Finding fossils depends as much on light and time of day as search image. I’ve walked over this Jurassic sandstone sidewalk slab multiple times over 14 years but only today saw the spider tracks, those clusters of three dots. 🧪
I need to know how many tons a Jurassic spider weighed.
Mary found this Bold Jumper while gardening.
I have moved it into luxurious housing in my lab, along with a few flies and a juicy mealworm.
All of my friends seem to be spiders nowadays.
I collected my first spider egg sac of the summer — see, that means summer is finally here — and I got to load up the egg incubator.
Some of you might protest that that’s a device design for chicken eggs, but that’s just what Big Chicken wants you to think. It’s calibrated for 28°C and 65% humidity, which is perfect for spiders, and I also bought some decorative plastic ovoids from a craft store that might, from a distance, look a bit like chicken eggs, but I’m putting spider egg sacs in them.
I’m just saying, next time you crack an egg for your breakfast, you might be surprised at what comes swarming out.
In our yard, building a web, it’s a little baby spiderling only about 2mm long.
It’s been one of those days.
Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!
I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.
I told you I was running away from home this afternoon! I was walking for 2 or 3 hours, and now my quads are killing me–I’ve been sedentary for too long. I didn’t have much luck finding any interesting spiders, but the bushes are alive with spider food, swarms of gnats and midges, and if you feed them they will come.
As soon as I got home, of course, I find a spider on my garage door. It’s a very small Attulus fasciger, and it has been hunting successfully. That’s a midge of some sort, totally wrecked in the spiders jaws.
Asiatic Wall Jumping Spider
More will be coming. It is that time of year. Hooray!
I’ve been checking this one spot along my walk to work all Spring, a row of metal signposts along a parking lot. These are simply dark metal objects that absorb what heat there is, and while they look barren and uninteresting, they have been a reliable home for a population of small spiders.
On Sunday, I saw nothing there. Yesterday, Monday, I saw this:
It’s silk. Just a few strands of spider silk across the bar, telling me that spiders have moved in. All of the signposts have silk to varying degrees, suggesting that maybe there was a recent hatch and a spider swarm is repopulating the area.
It’s reassuring to see, even as I’m buried under grading. Just two weeks to go before the semester ends and 6 months of sabbatical begins.
Blue seems to like her new housing. She even likes the artificial flowers I gave her, climbing to the top and pressing her face against the glass.
