Which is why we found her lurking under our dining room table, where it’s cozy and warm.

Do you know who is living under your furniture and behind your cabinets?

You know, you have to love the look of joy on their faces when they open a surprise box. I imagine it would be like the Australians who opened a box intended for nesting opossums and saw this:

I know I’d be excited. Wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately, there’s a shortage of Huntsman spiders here in Minnesota. We’ve got lots of Pholcus, though. I’m thinking of going down into the basement and scooping up a swarm of cellar spiders, putting them in a gift-wrapped box with a ribbon, and mailing them off to the grandkids.

How can they not be delighted?

I have not been advertising this aspect of my research, but I have been striving towards developing a Perfectly Spherical Spider. Here’s my first success.

What good is a spherical spider, you might ask. The benefits are legion. For one, think of their utility in physics problems.

Actually, what happened is that I’ve started trying to breed the spiders with my impoverished bunch of small, young males, and because I was concerned about preventing nuptial cannibalism, I gave the lovely females a big banquet on their wedding night, and boy did they eat. It may have worked against me, because a) this female hasn’t budged in a couple of days, and I don’t think she can move, and b) the male I put in her cage gave every appearance of being fascinated and terrified, and orbited her at a distance of 5-10 cm. I’m hoping he might have darted in at some point over the weekend and done the deed, but who knows? I’ve pulled him out now and will place him with a possibly less intimidating female.

Isn’t she lovely, though?

Physicists: they make silken draglines, you could probably use spherical spiders in pendulum problems, too. You can’t do that with spherical cows!

Mary and I went on a spider safari. In our house. It started out fine; we didn’t find much in the living spaces of our home, but then we decided to dive down into…the basement.

We found MONSTERS!

Oh, wait. That’s just one thing from my son’s old Dungeons & Dragons collection. What we actually found was Pholcus. Pholcus everywhere. We took a few photos before fleeing.

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I planned to start mating spiders today, and got my first disappointment: I waited too long, I think, because several of the males had died. I think maybe they pined away with blue pedipalps. The males are definitely more fragile.

So then I fed a couple of mighty females so they wouldn’t be tempted to snack on the boys, and then introduced them to males. The males immediately scampered to the far side of the cage. No mating today, at least not that I’ve seen. I’ve left them together and hope the guys make it through the night.

A while back, I told you I had a slight problem: I probably had two nearly indistinguishable Parasteatoda species in my colony, P. tepidariorum and P. tabulata. The way to tell them apart is by close examination of their genitals, or by dissection, and a) I don’t have the skill to do that, and b) I’m trying to maintain a live, breeding colony, so taking individuals apart to figure out their sex is off the table.

I did hatch a cunning plan, however, to get a provisional identification. P. tabulata is known to build nests from scraps of debris and wind-blown litter, so I thought maybe I could get a tentative guess at their taxonomy by cluttering their cages with scraps and seeing who built homes for themselves. It’s not at all definitive, especially since they’re all living in a sheltered environment right now and even P. tabulata might find nesting superfluous, but I raided the department’s paper shredder and hole punch for little bits, and scattered them in all the tanks.

Most of the spiders ignored them. They couldn’t eat them, after all. But a few have slowly dragged bits and pieces of paper towards their roost and built little hidey-holes. Here’s Melisandre:

So maybe I can put together a rough behavioral test to estimate who is who? I don’t think a real taxonomist would be satisfied with it at all, but it’ll be useful for me, making it less likely that I send a P. tepidariorum male off to mate with a P. tabulata female, which probably wouldn’t go well.

By the way, P. tepidariorum is thought to be native to the Americas, that is, it hitch-hiked here with the first humans to move here; it colonized Europe when the human colonizers boats sailed back home. P. tabulata is probably native to Asia, and emigrated to the Americas and Europe much more recently. Both are thriving almost everywhere humans live now, but the timing would suggest that the two species diverged at least 15,000 years ago…or about 15,000 generations ago. It’s kind of neat how their morphology hasn’t drifted apart much, but their distinct genitalia make an uncrossable reproductive barrier.

Some students visited my spider-haunted office with a few questions, and they noticed…a spider descending from the ceiling. They shouldn’t have been surprised.

It was a jumping spider! I think they’re following me around now, because I’m finding spiders everywhere I go.

I know you’re in shock that I posted a picture of a bird (what is this blog coming to?), so let’s quickly compensate. I went into the lab this morning to see how the new lab-bred generation is doing, and they were looking great — they had nice webbing everywhere, they had slung some hammocks, and were hanging about looking comfortable, always a good sign. I ambled back to my office, took care of some student stuff, and took my time about getting back to snap a few vacation photos of happy spiders lazing in their new digs. In the time it took me to wander back, Lilith (S. triangulosa, obviously) had up and molted!

This is also a very good sign. The new spiders are getting comfy and growing.