Happy Halloween: New Giant Spiderweb Found!

You might remember my coverage of the giant spiderweb that ate Texas in 2007.  For Halloween 2010 I am happy to report for your creeping-out pleasure that a new giant spiderweb was recently reported in Maryland!

Greene, Albert; Coddington, Jonathan A.; Breisch, Nancy L.; De Roche, Dana M.; Pagac, Benedict B. (2010). An Immense Concentration of Orb-Weaving Spiders With Communal Webbing in a Man-Made Structural Habitat (Arachnida: Araneae: Tetragnathidae, Araneidae). American Entomologist, 56 (3), 146-156

The giant web was inside a waste water treatment plant, an open building covering almost 4 square acres.  And “immense” doesn’t really begin to cover it.  From the paper:

“We were unprepared for the sheer scale of the spider population and the extraordinary masses of both three dimensional and sheet-like webbing that blanketed much of the facility’s cavernous interior.  Far greater in magnitude than any previously recorded aggregation of orb-weavers, the visual impact of the spectacle was was nothing less than astonishing.  In places where the plant workers had swept aside the webbing to access equipment, the silk lay piled on the floor in rope-like clumps as thick as a fire hose.”

Remember, that paragraph was written by 5 mid-career professional entomologists and arachnologists.  If they were a bit freaked out by the size of the web….Well, you can draw your own conclusions.

One of the amazing bits of info in this paper was a quantification of just how much of this facility was filled with web. As you can see from this data table, in several areas over 95% of the space was filled with spider webbing.  The webbing was so dense that it actually pulled some of the 8-foot long fluorescent light fixtures out of place!  The authors also measured the number of individual spiders per cubic meter–and got up to 35, 176 spiders/m³ in some areas.

Oh, and the authors describe their estimates of total web volume as “markedly conservative” and “representing a minimum volume” (emphasis mine).  OMFG, indeed!

The researchers also mentioned the giant Texas spiderweb in their discussion, and suggest that giant multi-species webs may be more common than we realize.  Yay!

BTW, one of the authors on this paper also authored a recent paper on gigantism in spiders. I mention that mostly to  have an excuse to link to Kingdom of the Spiders.  William Shatner + Giant Spiders = Epically Bad Movie WIN!

(also, am I the only one that thinks that torch placement is….unfortunately suggestive?)

Truck

Author: Michael Perry
Bug Rating:

I always get books from the library, mainly because I really don’t like spending money when I don’t have to. (Some call this being a “cheap bastard”. Personally, I consider it “wise frugality.” )

Sometimes I check out a book and immediately know it’s one I want to buy to keep. Truck is one of those books.

By page 10 I had already found a bunch of things that made me think “I should save that for the blog.” By page 20 I was wishing I had written the book.

To give you a flavor:

” I tend to garden on impulse and intuition. Apparently there are better ways. If my raised beds have any consistency, it is that they are anemic and squirrel-riddled. My garden gives me inner peace and salad, but it also yields cat turds and wilt.”

and the painfully true:

“Seed catalogs are responsible for more unfulfilled fantasies than Enron and Playboy combined.”

It is superficially the story of his plan to rehab his International Harvester 1951 truck; it is actually the story of a life in a rural town and love; love of gardening, attempted love of women, and love of the human condition.

[repost from 2007, because I'm missing my garden and wanted to add the Bug Rating]

I will survive…

This seemed appropriate, given my last post.  You should probably not watch this if you haven’t had lunch yet.

Oh, the Irony….

The day after I posted how much I loved living on site at my job, I found out I’ll be cut to 50% next June; that’s effectively a layoff. It was probably inevitable that the state budget cuts would catch up to me.

The thing I will miss most about this job will actually be the Trumpeter Swans. (This is a photo that I took near my front door.)   I never was a birder until I took this job; it was all about the bugs. But I completely fell in love with Trumpeters living on this lake.

They are big, not terribly bright, and incredibly soft.  They have HUGE feet. Add in a recovery from near extinction and fluffy cygnets, and they’re impossible to resist.

But, while it will be hard to say goodbye to my awesome co-workers, students, and the swans, I’m kind of excited about the possibility of a completely new start.  Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while now know this job was waaay beyond a 40hr/wk employment experience; I wasn’t able to have much of a life other than work.  Aside from a rather spherical cat, I don’t have any dependents anymore; I am free to move anywhere I want.

I’ve spent some time thinking about what I want to do with the next 15 years until I can (in theory) retire.  I know what I’m good at; in fact, despite some considerable challenges, I think I’ve done some of the best work of my career in this job.  I’m good at social media and instructional design; I’m good with students, and I’m a good teacher and manager.  Somehow, if I can sort out how to combine that with bugs or nature-y stuff, I’ll be all set.

It’s clear to me that I need to do more hands-on stuff to really be happy. I’ve been applying for some very long shot jobs that I’m quite geeked about, but I don’t expect to successfully land.

The hard part is explaining why someone with a PhD wants to be a low-level flunky.  I’ve done the high-level admin thing. I climbed up the career ladder, and I found out the stuff towards the top is a lot less interesting to me than what’s at the bottom.

I would much rather be cleaning poop out of cages than planning a grant to fund the cages and poop cleaners, or create a multi-year strategic poop plan.

If you happen to know of any poopy jobs opening in the near future, please send them my way.

Caught in the Bug Net: 10.23.10

I wanted to make sure you saw this one from The Onion:

“GRAND IMPERIAL THRONE ROOM, CASTLE ROACH—His Royal Highness, King Leopold Blattodea IV, undisputed lord and ruler of the cockroaches, expressed dismay and concern Monday that the recent rise in bedbug populations could threaten his sovereignty over the realm of human squalor.
Gathered in His Majesty’s begrimed throne room behind the bathroom sink, a solemn coterie of royal advisers and nobleroaches received the king’s proclamation in tense silence, awaiting his word on precisely how the cockroach kingdom would respond to the bedbug scourge.”

Fake Science explains Bees. Sort of.

Alex rants about overblown honeybee doom and gloom statements.

The filmmaker of Born into Brothels has a new project she wants to fund about mantids!  The verbiage is a bit twee and new-agey, but the photography is spectacular.

Giant billboard Monarch Taxonomy FAIL is spotted by several blogs. *head desk*

Doug went on a trip (again) and came back with spectacular photos (again)–I especially like the teal grasshopper.

A truly amazing collection of insect sculptures–I think I’ve linked to this before, but well worth re-linking!

Ed finds a very nice bit of Rachel Carson history.

And last, but not least, David discusses a recent journal editorial that clearly does not get what ‘teh blogging’ is all about.

Mid-week Insect Recipe!

Need to use up the very last of your summer tomatoes? How about some waxworm tacos?

This video is part of Girl Meets Bug, a project by Danielle Martin.  I think she’ll be the next Nigella Lawson

Finally, I’m cool.

Sock-it-to-Me named me “Cool Girl of the Month.”

If you want to know more about me and my job, check it out!  My favorite part is their description of my “nature-loving moxie.”  I think that’s my new slogan.
Also? Now I get to tell people I’m Miss October.

Full Disclosure: They gave me super cute socks, too.

Things I’ve learned

Bug Girl checking the silo

So, I live on-site at my job. This is wonderful, because I get to live in a beautiful place I could never afford otherwise. And, heat is included in my rent, which is important for a North Carolina transplant in Michigan.

However.

One of the things I didn’t know when I decided to live here was that without fail, every damn time I wash my bras and string them up around the apartment on a drying rack with other lacy lingerie and underpants, THAT is when my co-workers from physical plant will decide to show up and finally fix my broken pipe, or some other long neglected maintenance item.

Sigh.

Bedbugs and Pesticide Resistance

I discovered that bed bug evolution–specifically resistance to pesticides–was also the subject of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center‘s podcast this month.  A FASCINATING interview with one of the grand old men of evolutionary genetics, James Crow.  He worked on DDT resistance back in the late 40s and 50s.

There is also a wonderful accompanying article at Understanding Evolution.  And, they repeat something that I’ve tried to explain in the past:

“Like pyrethrums, DDT kills insects by acting on the sodium pores in their nerve cells — and it just so happens that many of the same mutations that protect an insect against DDT also happen to protect it from pyrethrums. When DDT was first introduced, such mutations were probably extremely rare. However, with the widespread use of DDT in the 1950s and 60s, such mutations became much more common among bed bugs through the process of natural selection. Though DDT is rarely used today because of its environmental effects, these mutations have stuck around and are still present in modern bed bug populations. Because of the action of natural selection in the past (favoring resistance to DDT), many bed bug populations today are primed with the right sort of genetic variation to evolve resistance to pyrethrums rapidly.”

An Interview with Bug Girl

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe interviewed me about bedbugs and their treatment/prevention last week; you can listen here.  (My interview starts at minute 41.)

Aside from a brain fart where I said “spermatheca” rather than “testis”, I think I did ok at trying to keep it non-technical!

I want to try to cover some of the newer research on bedbugs over the next few months, since it’s a hot topic.  We talked about some of the new info about bedbug chemical signaling, but that didn’t make the cut into the podcast.