Usually, the science building I work in isn’t great for finding spiders — the custodians are good at their jobs. But sometimes, if you get down on your knees and poke around in the little crannies, you can find a few (I tell you, they’re everywhere, they’re just good at hiding). We explored my lab a bit today, and discovered a few things.

1. The Pholcidae have moved in, those great long-legged thugs. They’ve displaced at least one Theridiidae individual I knew of, and was leaving in place. Tsk.
2. The false widows I follow are generally small, which may mean they’re not finding much to eat.
3. We found wild Steatoda triangulosa! Or maybe feral. I can’t rule out the possibility of baby escapees.
   
   The reddish-yellow color is interesting. I don’t know if that’s a pigment variant, or if she’s been eating something weird.
4. One lonely tiny Parasteatoda was hiding beneath the desk.
   
   It shall be given flies.

This may not be what some of you want to hear, but try getting down and looking under your furniture or in the dark gaps between your furniture and the wall. You may find you have friends.

It’s a busy day with all these job interview related things, but over my lunch hour I banged out 8 more spider cages, even with my gimpy left arm. I used a saw attachment on my Dremel (sorry, neighbors, if there was a lot of high-pitched screaming noises from my lab) to quickly hack up some bamboo strips and quarter-inch dowels, and then slapped them all together with hot glue. So easy.

I’m letting them cool now, and then I have to go through and clear out the threads of hardened glue scattered around — although the spiders probably won’t mind the strings — and let any fumes air out for a day, and then fill them up with more spiders.

And clean up. My lab is full of sawdust and little scraps of wood right now.

I scoop you up, put you in a cage, take photos of you, and give you flies to eat.

She’s very tiny. I’m going to have to fatten her up a lot.

You may be pleased to hear that my initial test of my new spider cage architecture didn’t kill my test subject, and she actually looks a little more lively and relaxed this morning. She has started filling in a web and was hangin’ upside down and chillin’ like a boss — now that she has a bit of a cobweb, I’ll toss some flies in this morning and see how she reacts.

Then this weekend I’ll have to assemble another dozen or so frames. It takes about 5 minutes to cut sticks to size and tack ’em together with hot glue, so that won’t be too time-consuming.

I’ve been getting worried about the spider colony lately — I saw a phenomenon last year that I’m seeing again, where elderly female spiders begin hoarding the carcasses of their prey, and building thick, tangled webs that they hunker down in and don’t move. They wrap up all these dead flies into a mass and also scrabble up random debris to make a nest (the latter is probably normal) and they cease being productive. I also see the production of dead egg collections, often without even bothering to build an egg sac. Here’s an example:

Yuck. Filthy. You might spot the yellowish egg clumps at the top right and near the center. I’ve never seen this in the wild — usually the webs are regularly purged of dead prey — and it could be that this is a normal consequence of aging (senile spiders!) or I could have cause and effect reversed…maybe it’s the accumulation of filth that makes for unhappy spiders. I should just clean up the cage and see if it makes them happy and ‘normal’ again!

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You share, obviously. Mary found this handsome bold fellow in the house, and saved him for me.

It’s good news, too, because I’m desperate for more males.

There hasn’t been much fertility in this lab, and I don’t know what’s going on. The spiders are getting weird and lazy. Here’s Yara (last seen here), who has been building thick clumpy cobwebs and also assembling debris into a nest — she’s partly obscured by a wood shaving here. The strange thing is above her, and to the left.

Those are unhappy looking eggs enclosed in a thin web, not an egg sac. I can say with some confidence that they’re not going to develop.

This is awkward and annoying. Next week I’m going to sterilize cages with alcohol and set up new frames and repopulate, hoping this problem will go away. Maybe they’re stressed? Maybe they’re just old and lapsing into decrepitude?

I was just admiring this S. triangulosa that I found in the science building — an escapee returning to home? — and had to take a few photos. She’s very striking, with this high contrast black & white coloration.

I’ll tuck it below the fold for the arachnophobes.

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