Spider engineering

Hey! I was watching my spiders do this just yesterday!

(a) An adult Steatoda paykuliana female of the family of Theridiidae (courtesy of Alessandro Kulczycki, Aracnofilia – The Italian Association of Arachnology). (b) A Steatoda triangulosa that captured a lizard (Podarcis muralis) by using lifting technique (courtesy of Emanuele Olivetti). Schematic of the technique used to lift the prey. (c) The prey is detected by the capturing threads and, once it is, (d) the spider starts to attach pre-tensioned threads to it. (e) When the weight of the prey is won by vertical component of the sum of the tensions the prey detaches from the surface and (f) starts to be lifted.

It was a feeding day. Little critters like Drosophila are easily handled — I saw one swoop down on a drag line to a fly walking on the floor, hog-tie it with a couple of quick flicks of silk, and then haul it up in one smooth motion. That was impressive.

However, these guys do kill and consume prey many times their size. I saw one snag a mealworm, which then went into a frantic writhing struggle and broke free, ending up on the floor of the container. The spider dived on it, trussed it up again, and then hoisted it up about 10cm to the heart of its cobweb. They are amazingly strong, and as the diagram illustrates, very clever about leveraging the structure of their web to secure their prey.

I have not tried feeding them small vertebrates yet, but the lab next door to mine is a herpetology lab, full of spider food. Don’t tell Heather Waye, she isn’t personally keen on spiders already, and hearing that they might have designs on her research animal would not be very endearing.

OK, I’ll stick to invertebrates.

Don’t panic, it’s just a spider bite

Fortunately, I’m not as interested in social behavior of spiders as I am in just general development, physiology, and behavior of individual spiders. Here are some recent cool things I’ve read.

I’m working with Parasteatoda and Steatoda in the lab, so of course I’m curious about their venom. Maybe you wonder about what those common house spiders are packing, too. Here’s a breakdown.

Relative abundance and expression level of genes encoding predicted venom enzymes and toxins. (A) Treemap chart of the main classes of venom-related enzymes and toxins present in Steatoda nobilis venom gland transcriptome. The size of the rectangles is proportional to the number of genes in each category, indicated under the labels. The colour represents the log2 transcripts per millions (TPM) of the median expression of the genes in each category. (B) Expression levels of each gene in each enzyme/toxin category. Dots represent the mean expression of individual genes across three biological replicates ± SD; purple: enzymes, orange: toxins.

What’s it all mean? A is showing us the number of genes involved, while B is indicating the expression levels of those genes. It looks like about a third of the genes are toxins, but that those are relatively highly expressed in the venom. The purples are not toxins, those are ordinary digestive enzymes. An important component of the venom is a collection of enzymes that break down proteins and fats and carbs, everything you need to turn guts into a nice soup. The oranges are the actual toxins — all the “latro” prefixes tell you these were identified in Latrodectus, the black widow. There is a lot of similarity in the venoms of black widows and false widows! That α-latrotoxin is the one that we vertebrates have to worry about. Do we need to worry about our common house spiders? Maybe a little bit.

We reveal the striking similarity between the toxins found in Steatoda nobilis venom and that of black widow spiders (Table 1). The most powerful toxin classes (α-LTX, α-LCT, α,δ-LIT) and the enzymatic machinery allowing the venom to more easily spread into the prey (metalo and serine proteases, chitinases) are both present in large quantities. This however does not mean that Steatoda is as dangerous to human beings as some members of the genus Latrodectus. If isoforms of potent toxins are present, our study does not provide information about their potency. Evaluation of toxin toxicity would need to be performed before any conclusion could be reached. Nevertheless, given the composition of the venom depicted in this study, S. nobilis should be considered a species of medical importance and there is no doubt that S nobilis (with Latrodectus tredecimguttatus) is one of the most dangerous spiders in Western Europe.

The easy solution is to not get bit. That’s not hard to do at all, these spiders are really not interested in you. Leave ’em alone, they won’t bother you.

If you are bitten — I’ve heard it’s a bit like a bee sting, although personally I’ve never experienced it — if you experience a strong reaction, the similarity to Latrodectus means black widow antivenin will be effective. As the paper says, though, they have nat assayed the potency of Steatoda venoms, and what I’ve heard is that they’re not as fearsome as black widow venom, so don’t panic. Besides, only one or two people a year die from the bite of the most deadly American/European spider, the black widow, while Steatoda has milder effects.

If you’re still worried, here’s a summary of recommended first aid. Wash the bite (infection is probably a greater danger than the toxins), use an antibiotic cream, and ice the area. Take ibuprofen and/or an antihistamine.

The Pruitt stink lingers on

Speaking of crimes, Jonathan Pruitt is in the news again. Pruitt, you may recall, was a scientist at McMaster University who studied social behavior in spiders — very cool stuff, I’ve read many of his papers, he formed collaborations all over the place. Except…it seems he had faked a lot of his data, saddled his collaborators with untrustworthy work, and meanwhile, Pruitt nonchalantly continued on in his position and sailed off to do fieldwork. McMaster University seemed to have no problem with this stuff, even after Pruitt’s Ph.D. was retracted for his fraudulent behavior.

I would have thought faking data and having your degree invalidated would have been sufficient grounds for an instant dismissal, but someone at McMaster was really dragging their heels about getting the rubbish thrown out. I wonder if Pruitt was talking about lawsuits behind the scenes?

Now we’ve got some progress to report. McMaster never got around to firing him, but Pruitt has resigned instead!

With a pivotal research misconduct hearing nearing, a behavioral ecologist under fire for more than 2 years for data irregularities or possible fabrication in dozens of publications has resigned from their prestigious position at McMaster University, Science has learned. The Canadian school confirmed yesterday in a statement it has reached a “confidential” settlement with Jonathan Pruitt, whose work on social behavior in spiders had earned international acclaim and whose willingness to share data drew many eager collaborators.

What required a “confidential” settlement? What needed to be settled at all? I don’t understand why a clear violation of academic and scientific standards should have required prolonged meetings and a hush-hush resolution. Did McMaster pay him to get out?

Now Pruitt is talking like he’s won a great victory.

Pruitt has not yet responded to McMaster’s statement about the resignation but yesterday, before the university confirmed the news, told Science in an email, “I am approaching a moment when I will be able to speak about #PruittGate in an open forum.” (Twitter users labeled discussions about the ecologists’ research #PruittGate in 2020, when the controversy erupted.)

Do we care anymore what Pruitt has to say? The evidence that he faked data is strong and pretty much irrefutable. Nobody has been waiting to hear what excuses he can come up with. There’s a palpable arrogance to that statement. Especially given the few hints we’ve got about this settlement.

In the past few days, Laskowski says, McMaster contacted some of those researchers to say there would no longer be a hearing because of the settlement. The university noted in an email that as part of the deal, “Dr. Pruitt agrees that they will not initiate any legal action against you for making complaints to McMaster University about Dr. Pruitt, or for your participation in any McMaster University process or investigation.”

What the fuck? Laskowski was the victim here. McMaster has basically cancelled any investigation into wrongdoings and left all the collaborators whose work was corrupted by Pruitt hanging, and apparently Pruitt had threatened to sue the people who exposed his shoddy work. What an awful person.

Although Pruitt is no longer employed by McMaster as of 10 July, according to the statement, the university has still not revealed any conclusions from a recently completed probe into the scientist’s research. That leaves some journal editors and researchers in the field confused about what work from Pruitt remains trustworthy and whether any research misconduct occurred. “It’s appropriate that Jonathan is no longer employed—hopefully at any academic institution,” says Kate Laskowski, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California (UC), Davis. “But I won’t feel [McMaster administrators] have done enough until they make public their findings about the investigation. … I’m extremely frustrated.” Laskowski first brought concerns about Pruitt’s data to public light, via a blog post, in early 2020 after anomalies in a publication on which they were co-authors were brought to her attention.

Hey, confused journal editors and researchers, it’s easy to tell what work of Pruitt’s remains trustworthy: NONE OF IT. I read a fair amount of the scientific literature on spider behavior (it’s interesting!), and one thing I do to assess whether it’s worth reading the whole paper is to first look at the authors. If “Pruitt, J” is among them, I don’t need to waste my time reading it.

That’s the real injustice here. His coauthors don’t deserve that kind of dismissal, but I’m really not going to bother trying to sort out fact from fiction in those papers.

Welp, guess it’s time to start committing crimes

Only big crimes, though. The little crimes get you shot.

At least, that’s the lesson I get from the news. Arm yourself with a big gun, go murder a couple of protesters, you’re fine — better than fine, you’ll be lauded by your fellow gun fondlers. Commit treason and try to overthrow the government, and if you’re the big kahuna who incited it all, everyone is afraid to arrest you, although your little dupes get picked up and get jail time. Fill a court with incompetent ideologues, and you’ll be safe from everything, in addition to corrupting the entire goddamn government. Wrap yourself up in a great big flag and a great big god, and no one can touch you, as long as your criminality is sufficiently massive.

That’s justice in America. I really should start planning my crime spree. It’s tough, though. You can’t just knock over a local bank, instead you’ve got to wreck the entire economy to steal billions, and then you can get away with it. Anything less, then some bigger crook will take your ill-gotten gains and punish you.

Also, darn it, I’m infected with this no good secular morality that tells me I shouldn’t do harm to others. It’s really getting in the way of taking advantage of our system.

At least they had good hygiene

The Uvalde police have released surveillance video of their actions in the school. It doesn’t help their case.

I’m not including the video, but it doesn’t contain much violence — quite the opposite actually. It’s edited down to a few minutes rather than over an hour, but it’s all inaction punctuated with occasional sounds of gunfire. Of course they could edit out the boring parts because there were lots of them — cops standing around in a hallway. At worst, your imagination is going to be horrified thinking about what’s going on in the classroom you can’t see when the burst of gunfire sounds.

At 12:21 p.m., 45 minutes after police first arrived on the scene, four shots are heard and at least a dozen officers move toward the classroom.

An officer can be heard saying, “They’re making entry.”

Yet they do not.

At 12:30, an officer wearing a helmet and ballistic vest pauses to squirt hand sanitizer from a wall-mounted dispenser and rubs his hands together. Other armed officers walk back and forth, and discuss the classroom doors and windows. The hunt for the keys continues. One officer eventually brings a sledgehammer. The audio from the surveillance camera at times is garbled, but it is loud in the crowded hallway.

At 12:41, a man wearing blue rubber gloves and a black shirt, khaki pants and a black baseball cap, with a stethoscope around his neck, arrives and speaks to officers. Other paramedics arrive with supplies. Two officers in camouflage fist-bump each other.

At 12:50, a cadre of officers crouches outside the classroom. A burst of gunfire is heard, and the video ends. Authorities have said a Border Patrol officer killed the gunman. Investigators are awaiting the results of an analysis from an Austin-based medical expert on how many victims died after police first arrived.

The guy who casually strolls across the hall to rub his hands with disinfectant is jarring. He’s holding a big gun, and he’s hearing the big gun going off in the classroom he’s avoiding entering, and I guess he was worried about getting COVID.

It’s missing the perspective of the kids in the classroom.

All the time the cops are idling in the hall, fidgeting with their gear, there are little kids desperately trying to pretend they’re dead to avoid the attention of the murderer who shoots anyone who makes a sound, watching their playground friends getting slaughtered.

These anti-education frauds don’t belong anywhere in public life

Larry Arnn, the president of a Christian bible college, Hillsdale, gave a little talk at a private reception that you weren’t supposed to record, because he felt comfortable saying the quiet part out loud.

Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department. Ours [Hillsdale’s] is different. They are the dumbest part of every college. [Audience laughs.] You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.

Well, I hate to break the news to you, Larry, but Christian colleges are the dumbest part of the American system of higher ed. They’re the part that expects students to adhere to dogma, instead of questioning everything, and make the myths of magical beings that didn’t exist a key part of the curriculum. I don’t think Arnn is qualified to judge what is “dumb”, since he has a history of wallowing in dumb for all of his life.

His logic is bad, too. Some fields of study have “subjects,” like physics or literature (which is just about reading books), but education…doesn’t? Except that it does, since it’s the “study of how to teach,” but he rather feebly disqualifies that as not “a separate art”. Pedagogy, psychology, communication, and competence in a subject being taught don’t count, because Larry Arnn, shill for the Heritage Foundation, says they don’t.

We’ve got a good education program here at UMM — I guess Hillsdale doesn’t — and I have education students in my classes all the time. In order to get certified to teach science in a public school, they are expected to get a degree in a science discipline. The real thing. A full degree. No shortcuts. On top of that, they have to meet all of the requirements for an education degree, and it’s often a five-year program to complete. No, it’s not the “dumbest part” of my college. That title would belong to a theology department, which we don’t have, because we don’t teach inscrutable dogma and archaic magic.

There’s not a word of truth in anything Arnn said, but he really let’s slip the theocratic agenda of the Christian right.

Here’s a key thing we are going to try to do. We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.

That is absolutely not true. It’s a skill. It requires a solid foundation in knowledge. There’s a kind of arrogance in thinking you can just do it, or that all of education is an amorphous mass with no specialization required.

For instance, I teach college level biology, and no, I don’t think Larry Arnn could do it. He’d only miseducate his students. But I don’t think that implies that I could teach everyone and everything. My wife has a Ph.D. in child psychology, and is an expert in communicating with little kids and helping them learn. I don’t even compare with her in her domain, and she couldn’t do my job, and there ought to be some mutual respect for everyone’s unique abilities…unless you’re Larry Arnn, who thinks he could teach everything. What an ass.

It’s all part of the Republican plan to destroy public education, though. You declare that education isn’t a thing, that teachers can be easily replaced by any old yahoo (although, preferably, stay-at-home moms who aren’t permitted to work anywhere else), and you can start declaring schools superfluous.

I do wonder how Hillsdale parents are going to react to that, since many of those conservative families were howling about how the pandemic meant the kids had to stay at home, and although they didn’t say it, were probably cringing at the thought of having to teach their lovely little third-grader math every day.

What’s going on down in Bolingbrook?

William Brinkman has been documenting the strange goings-on in Bolingbrook, IL for years on his blog, and now he has gone and given us a book giving us a perspective on that weird place, called The Rift.

What if everything you believed was a lie?

Tom Larsen grew up believing in stories from the Bolingbrook Babbler newspaper: of UFOs, half-human weredeer, and of vampire gangs that roamed the streets at night. Then one day his parents told him the truth—the stories were all a lie.

Fresh out of college, Tom built a reputation as a blogger of the scientific skepticism movement, debunking the reports of paranormal events in his hometown. However, after famous podcast host, Jamie Kyle, posted a video about how Tom’s attempts to “hook up” with her at a skeptic’s conference made her feel uncomfortable, the blogger was furious.

Now, in his mid-twenties and still angry about his humiliation, Tom has made a career from defending the skeptical movement against “modern feminists”, including Humanist Heart, a group of social justice skeptics. And, when he hears that his hometown of Bolingbrook will host Humanist Heart’s congress, and Jamie will be their guest, Tom hatches a plan to confront the podcaster.

The only problem is that he must work for the Bolingbrook Babbler to gain access to the congress, and risk ruining his skeptic reputation. But an attack by a weredeer while working on his first assignment for the Babbler leaves Tom’s beliefs in pieces. The monsters, the UFOs, everything he tried to debunk—are all real!

Now, there are angry Men’s Rights Activists trying to disrupt the congress, weredeer have surrounded the area, and mysterious time rifts appearing throughout the village. Only Jamie and the Babbler can help Tom fix this, but will he be able to get past his anger and distrust before reaching the point of no return?

That sounds uncomfortably familiar, echoing the last decade of the skeptic/atheist movement. Except for the weredeer and the UFOs.

Wait. MRAs exist, and skeptics who resent not being allowed to use women as their toys exist…if a herd of pointy-hoofed mammals come after me at the full moon, I’m not going to close my eyes and say they aren’t there.

Discovering my role on campus

There was a call for campus bodies today — they were recording a recruiting video, I think, so they just wanted a swarm of college-like people to mill around on the mall. I dutifully showed up to do my part to serve the UMM community, like a good boy, and they started splitting up the mob. You walk here, you walk there, you two throw a football around, etc. Reasonably enough, they started organizing the young photogenic types first, setting them in motion. I was predictably the last one…and the organizers walked away, leaving me aimless, so I just moved out of the frame and hid behind a tree.

At least now I know my job. I’m the creepy old guy lurking in the shrubbery while the co-eds and jocks frolic in a bucolic collegiate scene. You can still sign up for the university, because you all know I’m mostly harmless, just kind of unsightly. The worst I might do is show you a spider.

What is a woman?

I got this question in email. Oh god.

I was wondering if you are, or were willing to comment on Matt Walsh’s movie, ‘What is a Woman?’?

While I did see your post on the question being asked to Ketanji Brown Jackson, I did find your response a little unsatisfying. Yes, coming up with an inclusive, biology specific definition is problematic; but Matt and others are just asking for a basic dictionary or functional definition. If you can define a cat, as for example, a member of the Family Felidae, or a carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, or a common family pet that purrs, then you should be able to provide a definition of a woman.

Most of the people asked in Matt’s movie either refuse to provide a definition, or give a circular definition. This is problematic in a couple of ways. Words have meaning. If you are unwilling, or unable, to provide a definition of a word that you use, then that word is meaningless. If you can define what cat, dog, or bird means, but can’t, or won’t, define man or woman, then there is a problem. If you are unwilling to define what a woman is because you are worried about the personal consequences of doing that publicly, such as public backlash, losing your job, etc. then you have a perfect example of cancel culture.

No, I didn’t see that movie, nor will I be seeing it in the future. It’s a stupid gotcha question.

You know, not everything fits into a tidy category that can be encapsulated in a brief dictionary entry. This bizarre need to make everything sharp-edged, black-and-white, rigidly and scrupulous defined is a you problem, not a me problem. I’m fine with ambiguity and complexity, and “woman” is an extremely complex category. If you’re going to complain about circular definitions, the Merriam-Webster definition fits the bill: “an adult female person”. Sure, go with that. “Adult” is ill-defined, “person” is the subject of many arguments, and “female”…well, here’s another dictionary definition: “of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs”. “Typically,” huh. So not necessarily? Or how about this alternative, “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”? That implies a simple binary, which is false, and worse, suggests males and females are opposites of each other, rather than positions on a continuum.

Oh, here’s another alternative: “characteristic of girls, women, or the female sex”. See “woman”.

You want a nice clean dictionary definition? Sorry, guy, that’s just a whole ‘nother ball of worms. The desire for a reductive simplification is a fallacious goal that is just going to fuck you up. It is not “cancel culture” if people give you the side-eye and think you’re an ass if you provide a simple-minded definition that excludes a large number of women who know they are women, who have a history of womanhood, who interact with society as women, who present as women, who live as women, because you want an inadequate 5 word definition that makes you feel like you’ve mastered the concept of “woman” while not actually understanding anything. That approach always leads to slotting all women into a narrow restrictive box that makes no one happy or satisfied. It also damages men, because then, since we’re “opposites”, we’re expected to shun anything that might overlap with femininity.

Here’s something else that’s problematic: that you think a theocratic fascist like Matt Walsh is making a good point by insisting that everyone must provide a narrow range of criteria for womanhood. Nope, not going to do it. I’ve met many women, and they are diverse. They’re not Barbie dolls, mass produced for your pleasure. Stop trying to find a single mold to define them, and accept them as people. If you face public backlash because they reject your expectations of how a woman should be, that’s not “cancel culture”. That’s just someone recognizing you are an asshole. And if lots of people think the same way, consider the possibility that it’s not their failure to define a word to meet your simplistic views, it’s that maybe you are an asshole.

You know who else liked Walsh’s awful movie? JK Rowling.

If you find yourself agreeing with either Walsh or Rowling, you’ve accepted a conservative view that dehumanizes women, reducing them to a cartoon.

Also, please don’t try to pretend the authority of biology supports your expectation of sharp, precise boundaries to everything. Biologists know that biology is fuzzy about everything.