Spiders give Mazda the Sac

Sometimes, life is better than I can imagine.  Insecty news has been dominated by this story the last couple of days:

Mazda recalls 65,000 cars for spider problem
A spokesman from Mazda said that yellow sac spiders (Cheiracanthium)  built small webs in the crucial vent lines. If those vent lines were to get fully blocked by webbing, the car’s fuel tank could conceivably build up enough pressure to crack and leak fuel….
Mazda identified the culprit as the yellow sac spider, or Cheiracanthium inclusum. The pale, mildly venomous creatures lay their eggs in silk-wrapped bunches — usually in vegetation.   But why they’re choosing Mazdas instead of, say, Porsche Spyders, is a mystery. As is the fact that only the 4-cylinder Mazda6 cars are playing host.

There are a lot of really interesting clues in these stories about just WHY a specific type of spider would take up residence in a fuel vent line. I found the official recall notice, but it was rather spare of specifics.   But don’t despair! Click and Clack at Car Talk have the scoop:

Beverly Braga, Product Communications Specialist for Mazda, assured me that yes, there have been 26 confirmed cases in which the webs of yellow sac spider have caused problems by blocking the evaporative canister vent line of certain 2.5-liter four cylinder vehicles.  Allen Dean, a research assistant at the Texas A&M University Department of Entomology, says it’s curious that this particular spider would be the culprit because they aren’t known for their large webs, unlike orb or tunnel web species. Ms. Braga confirms that no one seems to know why yellow sac spiders are attracted to the car or how they find their way into the fuel system. No fires, accidents, or injuries have been connected to this problem, but company engineers thought 20+ cases was too many to be a coincidence so Mazda is taking a proactive approach.

To say a bit more about the spiders involved–Sac spiders normally occur in your garden, and are relatively harmless, although they do have an irritating bite.  The term “sac spider” does NOT mean they spin webs in scrotums, which was the alarmed conclusion of one person I talked to.

Although, spider webbing probably would be pretty supportive and wick well….UnderArmor would have nothing on web underwear!

Wait. I digress.
Anyway.

Sac Spiders spin tubular webs, an example of which you can see in this image.  It’s kind of a sleeping bag affair, in which the spiders hide in the daytime.  These spiders are photographed on a blade of grass, so that should give you a sense of scale–they are tiny fellows, usually not bigger than 6mm.

The spiders come out and forage at night, so you can kind of see why a vehicle up off the ground would make a nice daytime retreat for an active hunting spider.

I like to imagine them snug in the fuel vent line, saying in a tiny, tiny voice: “Zoom Zoom this, sucka!”

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?)

Giant Spider invades Liverpool

Liverpudlians, beware!

Commuters arriving at Liverpool’s Lime Street station were greeted by a 50ft (15m) high mechanical spider clinging to a nearby redundant office block.  The 37-tonne beast heralds the start of a five-day piece of street theatre as part of the Capital of Culture year….

This statement probably caused some gnashing of chelicerae, though:

Helen Marriage, the producer of the show, said: ….”It has 50 axes of movement so all of it moves as you would expect an insect to move. [emphasis mine].

Ugh.

EDITED TO ADD: footage of the spider “awake” and stomping about town!

Additional video here.

Help for the Chronically Disorganized

I am still trying to disconnect myself from the blog, and my addiction to being online, so I can try to get some work done. Alas, I still seem to be having trouble focusing.

I just discovered the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization, via 43 folders. So now I have a new thing to waste time on while I try to get myself in order.
The good news: I am not, as they define it, chronically disorganized.
Bad news: I didn’t really learn anything new, other than to reinforce all the things I should be doing to get organized.

Oh well. Also, spider species named after Neil Young!

Insect wars and spiders

I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had time to post on a bunch of cool arthropod news items that have come out lately. Fortunately, Zooillogix is picking them up:

Insect Warfare (potential for insects as weapons of mass destruction)

Fossil Spider Digital Dissection

I would love to write more about use of insects in war–there actually are several instances other than the ones mentioned in the story.
But–GAH! Damn job keeps getting in the way of blogging!