I guess it’s a Blood, Sweat, and Tears kind of day

I’m not talking about the mountain of grading waiting for me.

The bad news: I fear Jenny By-The-Front-Door may have died. It’s cold and windy out there! No sign of a body, either — if she’d fallen out, I’m pretty sure the corpse would have blown away. I poked into her nest fairly thoroughly, and …

There’s an egg sac deep in the middle! With the multiple hatched-out egg sacs around her, she clearly had a fecund life. I may have to bring her nest into the lab and examine it more closely.

Speaking of the lab, I got in this morning and found that one of the egg sacs there had hatched. Baby spiders galore! I quickly did a partial separation into groups and gave them a lot of flies to gnaw on, so they wouldn’t gnaw on each other. I’ll come in this weekend and move as many as I can into individual containers. There’ll be some attrition — about a half dozen escaped and ballooned off into the corners of the lab, or the atrium, or the crawl space, or other people’s labs, where I hope they prosper.

Jerry Fisher ought to change the lyrics a little.

And when I die, and when I’m gone
There’ll be one child five hundred children born
In this world to carry on, to carry on

Dang, that doesn’t fit. Well, Jerry Fisher is still alive, I’ll trust him to do a better job on the lyrics.

May I take a few closeups of your genitals?

Here’s another wintertime project I’ve got to work on. I’ve got all these spiders I collected, and I’m confident that they’re all of genus Parasteatoda. However, we’ve got two species in this genus here in Minnesota: P. tepidariorum, which is the darling model system in developmental biology, and P. tabulata, which is more obscure, but I suspect is fairly common around here. In the literature, P. tabulata is the one that builds nests of debris suspended in their webs; P. tepidariorum isn’t described as doing that, but who knows? I’ve collected a lot of spiders in outdoor environments with the fancy cribs made of leaves and gravel, and the ones I collect indoors don’t do that. Is this just an environmentally-induced variant?

That’s not what the taxonomic literature says. Rather, there is some contentious debate about distinguishing the two, which is made clear by close-up inspections of dissected genitalia. Their epigynes have subtly different shapes.

This is not a playing field I’m competent to contest. You should see this stuff: intricate, carefully drawn illustrations of the P. tepidariorum epigyne vs. equally detailed drawings of the P. tabulata epigyne. OK, gang, I surrender — I struggle to figure out what the heck I’m looking at there. I clearly need to work on my knowledge of spider sexual organs, not something I ever expected I’d have to do. I’m also handicapped by the fact that I’m working with live animals, and killing them and ripping out their genitals and clearing them in clove oil is kind of antithetical to breeding them. Also, I like my little spider friends.

So I’m trying to get photos of their genitals to see if I can distinguish them. Here’s one. Pretty racy, I know.

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Adventures in Spider Husbandry #arachtober

I’m done with seeking out spiders in their natural environment, for a while. I’m keeping an eye on a few outdoors (Jenny By-The-Front-Door still lives, despite the recent snow, and there’s a nearby compost bin I have my eye on), but mainly I’m settling in for a winter of laboratory observations now. So here’s a quick review of how I’m raising my spider family.

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All of my schemes musically exposed

How did these guys figure out my plan way back in 2017? I’d only just started exploring the arachnid option back then!

Humankind: I have the solution
To your mess of crime, scandals and pollution
I have done the work
Hey relax, there will be no delay
All my little friends are on the way

Wrap tycoons,
Fatcats, politicians, inside silk cocoons,
Drain them of their vital juices
Raise the flag! Tyrantula tenure has begun
We won’t be around when it is done

The time is now—
I’m gonna let my hungry spiders out,
Because they are the only ones who have the guts
To find and purge the world of all its human sin
They will envenomate our failures!

We can spin a web of hope
Here in my Arachnotopia
Nothing is beyond the scope
Of the grand Arachnotopia

We can spin a web of hope
Here in my Arachnotopia
Nothing is beyond the scope
Of the grand Arachnotopia

Listen to the misanthropes—
Start anew, Arachnotopia!

(You’re gonna get it!)

#Arachtober: The #Spider Swarm!

My colleague, Chris Atkinson, told me yesterday that he’d been seeing a lot of spiders in his compost heap. “Interesting,” I thought. Then he sent me this photo:

WHOA. Look at all those spiders.

So I stopped by this morning (how could I not?), and the photo doesn’t do it justice. It is spider paradise. It’s a spider commune. There are all kinds of bugs living in the compost, and all over above them is a dense communal spider web, packed with spiders. I’d suspected it from the first picture, but I stuck my face down there and confirmed it — Steatoda borealis, the Northern Combfoot, which I’ve occasionally found while prowling about town, but this was the Mother Lode. I got a few closeups of one of their number in their web.

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