I just learned in their newsletter that the American Arachnology Society meetings are cancelled this year. Aw, darn — I was looking forward to that. The thing is, too, that they were scheduled to take place in early July, at UC Davis, so this is right now the most proactive cancellation I’ve encountered yet. Meanwhile, my university is pretending we’ll be back in business in 2½ weeks, which is rather absurdly optimistic. The other con I regularly attend in the summer is Convergence, around the end of August. There aren’t any whispers about cancelling that, at least not yet.

The AAS newsletter also has a nice article on teaching kids to be comfortable with spiders, so that’s a plus.

I think I’ll be spending the whole summer right here in Stevens County.

I’m sorry, but the spiders have put up big “Do Not Disturb” signs all over the place, so I have to leave them alone…until they’re hungry again.

I put some more spider photos on my Patreon account — last time I neglected to mention that I also post some on Instagram, where they are free and you don’t even need an instagram account to see them.

I fed everyone big ol’ waxworms yesterday, and today they’ve been turned into big ol’ spider bellies. The ones I photographed are all new additions, spiders that were born here in my lab as tiny little spiderlings, and have now been successfully raised to pulchritudinous maturity.

I still occasionally post photos of my friendly neighborhood spider friends, but I’m avoiding putting them here. If you really, really like arachnids, you’ll have to join my Patreon to see my Breakfast at the Spider Ranch post. And if you really, really hate spiders, you don’t have to see them!

Hey, this is the same thing I tell everyone: spiders are mostly harmless, and they’re there whether you like them or not.

Spiders are not out to get you and actually prefer to avoid humans; we are much more dangerous to them than vice versa. Bites from spiders are extremely rare. Although there are a few medically important species like widow spiders and recluses, even their bites are uncommon and rarely cause serious issues.

If you truly can’t stand that spider in your house, apartment, garage, or wherever, instead of smashing it, try to capture it and release it outside. It’ll find somewhere else to go, and both parties will be happier with the outcome.

But if you can stomach it, it’s OK to have spiders in your home. In fact, it’s normal. And frankly, even if you don’t see them, they’ll still be there. So consider a live-and-let-live approach to the next spider you encounter.

The author of that article is also one of the authors of a paper I’m citing in something I’m working on now, in which he and colleagues did a thorough, room by room search for all arthropods in houses in a North Carolina region. One of their observations is that 100% of the homes had Theridiidae (common house spiders, like the Parasteatoda I’m studying) living in them. They’re kind of unavoidable. In my own much more limited survey (we only examined garages and sheds, and only arachnids, here in the harsher environment of Minnesota), we saw some similar results: almost all garages housed spiders. The one exception was eerily meticulous, everything stored away in tidy boxes, and no cobwebs or even dust. There are people who dust their garages! Unless you are that thorough, though, they’re there. And even if you are, they’ll sneak in — later that summer, we did find a few spiders in a shed on that same property. They looked terrified. Don’t worry, I didn’t rat out that they were there.

(Note: we were pretty strict about confidentiality, all locations are encoded in a file separate from the data on spider populations. You’d have to go through two sets of paper records matching addresses with spider counts to pin an identity on the houses with the most, or least, spiders.)

By the way, I have in mind proposing a workshop to Skepticon this year, an effort to counter arachnophobia. What I was thinking is a series of staged tables, where the beginning is something like 1) coloring pages of spider drawings, with explanations of anatomy; 2) a table of photos (maybe in trading card format?) of real spiders; 3) some small, caged spiders where we could observe feeding and courtship; and 4) a few harmless spiders, like Pholcidae, where people could actually let them clamber around their hands. Participants could ease in gradually and stop where ever they feel comfortable, and see people actually interact harmlessly with spiders.

What do you think? Would you actually participate in such a thing, if you had the opportunity? What number would you stop at?

I put more spider photos on Patreon and Instagram. Today’s subjects are members of the tribe of Pholcus phalangioides who are dwelling in my basement. They seem to have undergone a population crash recently, though, probably because, while it’s warm enough in our house, they’re probably getting hungry at the lack of invertebrates to eat here in the depths of winter.

I said I’d stop flashing spider photos at you all, so really, it’s safe to come back here if you’re arachnophobic. I still occasionally indulge on the Patreon site, and I just added a few this morning (I’ll put them on Instagram shortly). My model was the lovely Danu, a Parasteatoda tepidariorum I caught at Skepticon in Missouri last August. My lighting setup was far short of ideal, though, so I’m going to have to work on that.

Yes, I still have those St Louis spiders in my lab, they’re doing fine, but in the absence of St Louis males, are not producing babies for me. I guess I’ll just have to go to Skepticon again this year and find some mates for them. Maybe if you go to Skepticon, I can draft you to help!