Perhaps you recall the majestic Larinioides I found at Pomme de Terre park almost two weeks ago? It laid a large pink egg sac in the container we had it in, as a present before we released it back into the wild.

Today, or perhaps last night, they started hatching. Here’s a baby Larinioides spiderling, freshly emerged, and looking a bit stunned.

They’re back in the incubator until I see that a few more hatch out, and then they’ll be released to the world.

Waaah. I just have the closing banquet tonight, and then tomorrow is a long travel day home. So what did I learn?

• Spiders are cool, but I guess I already knew that.
• Spiders are a jillion times more complicated than I thought, and I’ve got a lot to learn.
• Spider meetings are small and cozy and nice.
• I’ve made a list of a dozen experiments that I think are doable by undergrads, and will provide interesting information.
• I need to get home to start putting these ideas to work.

I guess that’s a pretty good outcome for a meeting, to end it inspired and better informed than I was at the beginning.

Next year AAS2020 will be held in Davis, California. I’m hoping I can fit it into my budget.

I was at dinner with a group of arachnologists last night, and I was surprised when I mentioned that I was from Minnesota and was then told that I was one of the only two arachnologists in the state. I was firstly startled at actually being told I was an arachnologist since I’m still trying to get a good grasp of the field, and secondly surprised that they’re so rare (would you believe there are only 500 people in the International Society of Arachnology?). He qualified it by saying that I was one of two people who had officially registered with the American Arachnology Society, from which I learned a few things.

If you want to be an arachnologist on paper, it’s easy — just send in your membership dues.

If you are a real arachnologist in Minnesota, with skills and expertise and deep knowledge, rather than a wanna-be like me, you’re behind. Send in your membership dues. Otherwise, people will keep mistaking me for you.

Otherwise, if you want to become a real arachnologist, here’s an article on the subject. It recommends starting in childhood and your teenage years, which is a little worrisome, since I waited until I was 61 to start. But you can do it! Unfortunately, unlike being an arachnologist on paper, it’s going to take a lot of hard work.

This meeting is really an exercise in attitude readjustment. I’ve been steeped in the zebrafish world for so long that I’ve unconsciously held the model organism perspective — here’s my animal, all I have to do is query it deeply with increasingly thorough techniques, and I shall understand biology. Now I’m in a world where every observation is tested against a dozen closely related species, and a dozen distantly related species, and a dozen outgroups that aren’t even in the same order, and everyone is sprawling out horizontally to get a feel for the dimension of a problem rather than digging down vertically into one convenient animal bred specifically to thrive in the artificial environment of the lab. It feels strange and sometimes uncomfortable.

I’m also sometimes totally lost. I was at a session yesterday where arachnologists were just projecting photos from their personal collections, and where I was content to just think “OK, I guess that’s a spider”, other people were shouting out latin names and recognizing old friends. Or worse, “here’s a spider I haven’t been able to identify, and I consulted the world’s foremost expert, and they had never seen it before either”, and it begins to sink in that we’re surrounded by an immensely diverse population that is so wild and weird that we have no idea who they all are, and that I’m going to have to do a lot of work to catch up. It is intellectually terrifying and bizarrely stimulating.

Every once in a while, fortunately, I find something to anchor myself. Yesterday was all about spider silk, which, on the one hand, is molecular biology and can be reduced to genes and physical interactions with the environment (adhesive droplets on webs are a product of self-assembly, contingent on things like humidity and temperature), but on the other hand, of course spiders produce an incredible diversity of different kinds of silk. Sometimes, it all gets to be a bit much.

Looking at the program, this morning is all about biogeography, diversity, evolution, ecology, and life history, while this afternoon is all about behavior. I’m pretty sure my brain will explode at some point today, because I can assure you that there won’t be any single principle that I’ll be able to condense everything down to.

I’m out here at Washington and Lee University to attend the American Arachnological Society 2019 meeting, and the sessions start in a few hours. It’s going to be intense: the sessions today are on functional morphology, morphological evolution (the session I most look forward to), molecular phylogenetics and systematics, and circadian rhythms. Damn, I’m interested in them all. My brain is going to be running hot all day long, so it’s a good thing the program culminates in a trip to a brewery to cool it back down.

There are no zebrafish talks to give me a retreat to the familiar, so it’s going to be a challenging day.

Oh, also, I met another first-timer here at AAS, and learned she has a blog called Spidermentor — it’s very good. It’s full of stories about collecting and raising and observing spiders in Western Pennsylvania, and is first-rate science communication. Check it out while I’m getting a high-speed cerebral infusion today.