Another day in the spider lab

I took care of some tedious maintenance work in the lab today — organizing the vials of spiders (lots of them!), double-checking their classification and sex and relabeling them. I color-coded them by species (white is Parasteatoda, green is Steatoda borealis, yellow is Steatoda triangulosa) and made pink and blue stickers for females and males, which tells you the degree of excitement at the lab bench!

But some fun stuff was going on. Remember Brienne, the hugely swollen female that we were sure was going to make an egg sac any day now, and she didn’t, and she kept getting bigger and bigger? She finally got off the pot and laid a big batch of eggs!

Here’s Brienne before:

Here’s Brienne now:

Finally! She hasn’t moved from that corner of her cage, but it’s got to be a relief to expel that load. The egg sac is bigger than she is!

Also, as I was sorting through the spiders, I saw that another egg sac had popped overnight. Here’s a contented female surrounded by her brood in one of our vials:

She’s a nameless P. tep, which seems callous now — we don’t give them names until we move them into the bigger cages, but they’re still quite capable of pumping out eggs in more cramped quarters. Maybe I’ll have to give her a newer, bigger home…and a name. Got any suggestions?

Today’s spiderwalk: featuring a patch of prairie

Getting away from the decaying, abandoned human homes for a bit, we acted on a tip from a colleague and visited Stahler prairie, a lovely spot of land near the university that was donated to us for research and teaching. I didn’t even know it existed until this morning! Those ecologists…always keeping secrets from us lab geeks. But now we know, and we went strolling through the grasses. That’s Mary, off in the distance.

We were disappointed at first — the place is buzzing with bugs, and we found quite a few large webs, but we didn’t see much of the resident spiders. Big empty webs meant there had to be a webspinner nearby, but these are cunning beasts and very good at hiding. We finally found one big Neoscona cozy deep down in a tube made of a furled leaf.

We’ll be back, Stahler Prairie! We’re figuring you out and we shall tease out your secrets!

The latest poll on creationism is out

The latest Gallup poll is interesting.

The anti-science, evolution-denying creationists have had an uptick (the grey line). I’d guess that’s due to radical conservativism experiencing a triumphal moment right now — a rising tide of sewer sludge fills the hip-waders of all the wacky denialists.

That uptick seems to have come entirely at the expense of the theistic evolutionists (the green line) who have lost a smidge of popularity.

Despite the slight rise of creationists, the godless evolutionists (the dark green line, the color of our heart’s blood) are still rising! Again, I’ll credit that to, in part, our current political polarization. Although I’d like to claim that better education on the subject is helping, too.

All of these shifts are slight, and shouldn’t be over-interpreted.

The latest findings, from a June 3-16 Gallup poll, have not changed significantly from the last reading in 2017. However, the 22% of Americans today who do not believe God had any role in human evolution marks a record high dating back to 1982. This figure has changed more than the other two have over the years and coincides with an increasing number of Americans saying they have no religious identification.

We might be edging upwards, but it’s a nail-biter with the final innings far off in the distance.

Spider hunting in the haunted barn

We went on another field trip today, to barns in Hancock. I had predicted that we’d find many more orbweavers in barns than in garages and sheds, and that’s tentatively true. We first visited a working barn, one with lots of chickens strutting around, and didn’t see a dramatic difference in the spider populations, though — I suspect that chickens are going to eat any large, bold orbweaver that exposes itself. These barns had the densest cobwebs I’ve ever seen, and lots of hidey-holes for our friends the Theridiidae, so we only saw a scattering of S. borealis and P. tepidariorum.

Then we saw the abandoned, crumbling farm down the road. “Hey, let’s go explore that!”

Preston led the way through the weeds and thistles.

This place had definitely seen better days. The ceiling was falling in, the windows and doors were gone, you could just walk in through the gaps in the walls. The floors were littered with old debris from long-gone residents. It was a sad place.

It was clearly an old dairy farm. Maya found the milking room.

Maybe we should have turned back when we found the rotting, decapitated doll. If this were a video game or a horror movie, that would be a sure sign we were on the path to Hell.

But what we found inside were…

[Read more…]

I have to remind myself that the foundation is not a distraction

Honestly, I often feel like the creationist wars are an irrelevant distraction when there are greater threats to our civil liberties and political system…I mean, it’s hard to get worked up about some pathetic god-botherin’ dweeb getting onto a school board on a platform of transparent lies and superstitious nonsense when fascist jackboots are stomping in the streets and white nationalists are murdering people.

But that’s what they count on. Oh, you’re worried about racism in the highest offices in the land? Perfect time to pack state houses and city councils and schoolboards with assholes while you’re not looking. It never ends. And then in a few years we all look back and say, “why didn’t you pay attention to local races?” and we have to remind ourselves that the roots matter.

So. Florida has a new Board of Education chairman, Andy Tuck. He’s another of those petty theocrats who doesn’t trust science but still insists on being in charge of education. This Andy Tuck:

School Board Vice Chairman Andy Tuck said Thursday, “as a person of faith, I strongly oppose any study of evolution as fact at all. I’m purely in favor of it staying a theory and only a theory.

“I won’t support any evolution being taught as fact at all in any of our schools.”

Brandon Haught is reluctant to call him a creationist. I’m not. Someone who thinks the established, well-substantiated science of evolutionary biology should not be taught in school is a creationist, a science-denier, and someone who should not have any responsibility in managing a classroom at any level.

Censoring science in the public schools is just one step on the road to creating another generation of Fox-News-watching, MAGA-hat-wearing, science-denying fuckwits who will work to wreck the country while declaiming their patriotism. This is how we get an electorate that puts the worst people in high office.

Wanna piss off Ken Ham?

The easiest way is to point out that his Ark Park was built on government handouts.

  • A tax-rebate program nets the Ark Park more than $1.8 million annually from the state. Under the plan, the state charges a 6 percent tax on the sale of tickets, food and souvenirs at the park. The funds are forwarded to the state, but once a year, all of that money is refunded to the Ark Park. It flows directly from the state treasury to Ark Encounter.
  • As bloggers William and Susan Trollinger have pointed out repeatedly, the city of Williamstown floated $62 million in junk bonds for the Ark Park to subsidize the building of the structure. (By the way, Williamstown officials did this because they bought Ham’s claim that the Ark Park would spur tourism in their town. But that hasn’t happened, and now Ham says it’s their fault because the community is too far away from the interstate.)
  • The Grant County Industrial Authority gave Ark Encounter $175,000 to offset the cost of land. In addition, local officials agreed to sell nearly 100 acres of land to Ham for the princely sum of $1.
  • The state spent $10 million on highway improvements on a road leading to Ark Encounter.

Ham will fire off angry letters to the local newspaper and flood Twitter with indignant tweets if you point out that his grand building-that-looks-vaguely-like-a-boat is a gross violation of church and state separation, and that he couldn’t have built it without suborning state and local officials to funnel tax money into his pockets.

If I said I was building a Spider Park in my lab that would be a phenomenal tourist attraction, do you think I could persuade the state of Minnesota to give me a million dollars a year? Or at least improve Highway 28 (or better yet, rail service) for better access to the University of Minnesota Morris?

Maybe if I set up an affiliated Church of the Spider God…

Women for Trump!

In case you missed it, our president* blessed a group called “Women for Trump,” in order to counter his reputation as a pussy-grabbin’ amoral wannabe-rapist who crashes beauty pageants to see naked teenagers in their dressing rooms. Jessica Valenti reports.

Let’s take a look at who’s leading that squad: The advisory board of Women for Trump is a who’s who of bigots and swindlers — with a few former beauty queens, Apprentice contestants, and a Pussycat Doll thrown in for good measure.

Among the board members is Cissie Graham Lynch, the Christian podcaster who argues that homosexuality is Satan’s way of “destroying a generation”; Peggy Nance, CEO of the radical anti-feminist organization Concerned Women for America, who opposed the Violence Against Women Act because it might offer protections for gay people, and expressed fears that gay Boy Scout leaders “put our young sons at risk”; New Hampshire state Rep. Lynne Blankenbeker, who said that married couples who can’t afford birth control should just practice abstinence; and Meshawn Maddock, who claims society “emasculates men.”

And what would a Trump advisory board be without a few fraudsters on the roster? Gina Loudon was caught lying about having a PhD in psychology. Sheriff Carolyn “Bunny” Welsh of Pennsylvania was taken to court by the county controller for paying her lieutenant boyfriend over $67,000 in unearned overtime, and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi neglected to pursue fraud complaints against Trump University after receiving a $25,000 contribution from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. And let’s not even get into Becki Falwell, her husband, and the pool boy.

It’s true, they are women. No one ever said women can’t be assholes, though.

Proud mama

I am just astounded at how many of the local spiders are guarding egg sacs right now. It’s as if they know the typical first frost is at the end of September, and then it won’t thaw until maybe May, so they’d better make babies before the killing freeze descends.