All the way home

The spider, a fat, yellowish half-inch blob of a spider, dangled herself from a thread directly over my bed. Over my pillow; I opened my eyes and found myself staring into hers. I squirmed out from under and got up.

I was living in a 50-year-old log cabin in the Bella Coola Valley, 300 miles as the eagle flies north of Vancouver. These were whole logs, unplaned, chinked with ancient mud, with a "new" addition of home-sawn lumber, insulated with ancient rags and sawdust; bugs of all sorts were always with us, and we had learned to tolerate them. More or less. A spider hanging over my head while I slept was too much.

I twined a stick in the web and carried her downstairs and outside to the front porch; she would be very useful there, eating mosquitoes.

The next morning, she was hanging over my head.

Rinse, repeat. And again. Every morning, there she was, fat and sassy.

I gave up; I carefully moved her to the other side of my bedroom, to the alcove in front of the window, open for the duration of the warm weather. She scooted into the framework. "Stay there," I admonished her.

A workable compromise. She hung there all summer, getting bulkier every day. Occasionally, I fed her a moth that insisted on buzzing my bedside lamp. When the cold weather came, she disappeared.

How is it that a spider does that? How does she find her way home? Why does she persist in living "here" and no place else? Unanswered questions.

Cut to the present, and my tame, citified existence. A tiny spider hung himself from a thread over my desk. I climbed onto a chair and reached for him; he scuttled up out of my reach. Ok, fine. Maybe he'd catch a mosquito for me. But later, here he was, walking along the edge of my in box. Not ok. Again, he didn't let himself be caught; after several of my attempts, he went back to the ceiling.

I kept on going after him for several days; he kept tying his threads to different items on my desk, but racing for cover at the least move on my part. I began calling him my "nervous wreck spider".

Finally, I managed to get above him and move him, thread and all. Outside with you, spidey!

The next evening -- you guessed it; he was hanging over my desk.

That did it. Next time I got a handle on him, he went into a plastic jar lid with a clear piece of plastic taped on top. Here he is, in jail:

Looks to me like a tiny cross spider, Araneus diadematus.

A couple of days later, I fed him a mosquito. He was afraid of the monster until it had tangled itself up in his web and was immobilized. Still a nervous wreck. See the relative sizes: those flecks at the bottom are mosquito scales.

This week I fed him a woodbug. But I must not have taped the plastic on as securely as I thought; in the morning, I found a dead woodbug, but no spider. Oops! Well, maybe, by now, he would have learned his lesson, and he is long gone.

Nope. He is hanging above my desk, as I write this.

Next time I catch him, he's going for a long trip, to the trees across the lawn. I wonder how long it will take him to make his way back.

Two that got away, one that didn't.

Seen on or near the beach in Boundary Bay:

A well-tied-down piling. Except that it up and left:


At the roadside, a crab, on the move. (Well, not really.)


A few houses away, the one that didn't get away. A whale. At least, its jawbone.


Here's a close-up, showing the texture of the bone:


And a few small rocks. These are a better size for the Rock Flipping Day. And are probably sheltering dozens of squirmy and crawly beasties each.

Neighbourhood Stroll

Down the alley, across the schoolyard, around the block. And home again. A breather in between chores.

Pink dead nettle?

The fruits or seed cases of some variety of magnolia.

Fading lily.

"Filler" in a flower pot.

Roses, getting ready to set hips.

And a rock, for the 2nd, the International Rock Flipping Day. Or is this still too big?

Flippin' Rocks

International Rock Flipping Day, September 2, 2007. Sounds like fun. I'm in.

How about you? Read all about it here!


Let's see:

• Camera -- check.
• Close-up lens -- check.
• Notepad -- check.
• Pen -- yup.
• Back brace -- uh-huh.
• Pry bar -- ok.
• Compliant teenager -- hmmm...
  

Well, maybe I'll just aim for something a bit smaller.

Sunny Afternoon

At Burnaby Lake.

We sat on the hillside, resting our feet and breathing non-musty air after an afternoon of antiquing. The sun had come out and the wind was warm. In the field below, beyond the parking lot, cricketers in white clattered and shouted. Farther down, a flock of Canada geese nibbled at the grass. On our left, the creek, hardhack and a stand of touch-me-nots, invasive but pretty. And directly in front, two model airplanes swooped, almost as graceful as swallows.


Not quite so graceful, nor so high: crows begging for handouts (I gave them stale peanuts) in the parking lot.

Just a shell from a garage sale

Abalone. Found on some distant beach, empty except for the remains of hitchhikers. Enjoyed for a time, stashed, forgotten, piled on a table with junk. Useful, perhaps, as a soap dish, an ashtray, a key catcher. Just a buck.

A teller of tales, if you look closely. And a thing of beauty.


In the sea, life builds on life. Kelp on clumps of mussels, snails on the kelp, barnacles on the snails, algae on the barnacles. Barnacles on everything, actually. The abalone bears both pink an white barnacles, still holding their shape. Others have broken off, leaving only the white scar of their base.


Tube worms cemented their homes among the barnacles; curlicues, macaroni shapes, masses of tiny shelly bubbles. And snails bored deep holes in the shell to get at the meat inside.


All this can be seen while the abalone lives. But the inner magic is only revealed after its death.

The "scar" where the muscle was attached.

One of a row of "portholes".

I am struck dumb.

Baby pictures

When the house spider's eggs hatched, 5 days ago, (We Haz Babies!) Wren wrote in the comments that she had only seen masses of spiderlings, never single ones. I have been watching ever since, hoping to catch one on its own.

Difficult. For the first 4 days, they huddled together around the egg case, so tightly that it was hard to see them with the naked eye as more than a grainy mass.

I tried to get photos, but they were just too tiny and too inaccessible, up in the dark corner, far above my reach, even from the stepladder, for clear shots.

Day two. Moving around a bit.

Day three. With artificial light.

Over the last two days, the crowd has been thinning and spreading out; their numbers were dropping. I kept looking for strays, but any that left the group just plain disappeared.

Last night, with only a couple of dozen babies left, I went out after dark with a flashlight and examined the web. Ah-hah! Tiny moving dots showed up along some of the strands. It took some doing, but I caught two.

Day five. Momma and the last of the brood.

Those guys are tiny! Inside, under the light, I could barely see them with the naked eye; they could have been dust motes, for all I could tell. Only with my hand microscope (60x) could I see them with any clarity.

So; no photos of single spiderlings. Sorry, Wren.

At that age and size, their abdomen is a pale yellowish tan, the thorax reddish. But they have their mother's fat belly, the darker joints on the legs, and the beginning of a pattern, tiny black dots on the upper abdomen. And under the microscope, I can see their eyes clearly, something I have never managed with the mother; she always seems to have them shielded behind the legs.

When I had done examining them, I realized that I could have gotten others all over me, prowling around the web; they are so small, I would never have noticed. Suddenly, I could feel them crawling down my neck and up my arms. Nothing but my imagination, but still, I had to shower and change clothes and wipe down the desk with alcohol before I could settle down again.

But what an adventure their life is! So tiny, and walking all that long, long way out of the mother's web, out into the world where danger lurks at every corner. The trees across the lawn are festooned with the webs of Araneus diadematus, several orders of magnitude larger than they and more than happy to snack on a mouthful of baby Achearanea. They will have far to go before they find safe places to set up shop.

Mud Shots

Mud Bay, a couple of weeks ago:

A line of grass sprouts from a hidden root. It reminds me of a windbreak; tall trees along a property line.

Dali? No. Just posts for some long-forgotten project. The mud won that battle.

A lone eagle, traveling fast, in a straight line. No circling here; there is no prey.

Is it censorship season or something?

Hard on the heels of the Turkish blocking of all Wordpress accounts, because one Adnan Oktar didn't like what bloggers had written about him, (see my post for links), comes this: a crackpot so-(self)-called scientist, Stuart Pivar, sues PZ Myers for libel.

Because he didn't like PZ's book review. Because PZ called him a "classic crackpot".

That's it. He didn't like the assessment, so he goes ahead and proves that it is appropriate; he acts like a "classic crackpot."

Blake Stacey has the story, updated as new comments come in from other blogs.

PZ, in one of his two book reviews (first edition, second edition of the book), shows a sample of his "research": an illustration of the development of a spider.

Here it is; you be the judge.

I had never seen before a spider with 10 legs. Here's a real spider, with all those legs clearly visible:

8 (eight) (4 per side) legs

Pivar's spider is not as accurate as this one (from an IIDB post):


At least they got the number of legs right. And, by the way, the number of legs is the first piece of information in any definition of the word, "spider".

From Encarta, for example:

spi·der plural spi·ders
noun
Definition: 1. eight-legged animal that spins webs:

Stuart Pivar is a crackpot.

We Haz Babies!

American house spider babies, that is. (Background posts: Spider Watching and Fresh-Laid Eggs!)

The proud mother:

Fat Momma with newest eggs

The Achearanea tepidariorum family; Momma, babies and egg case

Spiderlings! Aren't they cute?

I've been checking these eggs morning and evening. They first appeared Monday morning, the 20th. Which makes the incubation period, from July 26th to yesterday, 25 days. That question answered.

And she has laid a second batch of eggs, so I'll be looking for those babes the middle of September.

Next questions: 1. how many of those spiderlings will survive? 2. And how long will they sit around their old case before they move out? (I just checked with a flashlight; they are still clumped in the same spot.)

About the males: back in July, a small male hung around the web for a week or two. Then he disappeared, about the time she laid those eggs. I wondered if he had been eaten. Last week, there was another, a bit smaller; after a few days he had competition, a second tiny male. I kept an eye on them and watched one make advances up to within an inch or so away, but then he retreated to the edge of her web again. Yesterday, there was no sign of either male.

Question # 3: Does she eat the males as soon as they dare to breed with her? Or when she's ready to lay eggs?

Around the corner, Chica has laid her own eggs, the same day. Hmmm...

Chica. I love this photo, against the light.

Next: Baby Pictures

Turkeys!

Remember that insult? My kids and their friends were using it back in the 1980s, to mean something akin to "stupid". I thought it was unfair, sometimes to the birds, and sometimes to the targets, usually other friends.

It may come back, but now with a slightly different slant.

Turkey (the country, not the bird) has blocked all wordpress blogs because one real turkey, in the 1980s sense, by name Harun Yahya, complained that bloggers were "defaming" him. (Read, "telling the truth about" him.)

Read more about it on Bug Girl's blog, microecos, Thoughts in a Haystack, Pharyngula, etc.

I'll quote a section from Pharyngula.

That fanatical nitwit wrote in to wordpress to brag about his accomplishment and demand that blogs that offend him be shut down, such as this one, and by the way, he'd also like all these blogs censored:

http://adnanoktar.wordpress.com
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://fitikado.wordpress.com
http://oktarbabuna.wordpress.com
http://adnancilar.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktarveislam.wordpress.com/
http://whoisharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://adnanoktargercekleri.wordpress.com/
http://quiestharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://harunyahyaarabic.wordpress.com/
http://safsataciharunyahya.wordpress.com/
http://savsatalaracevap.wordpress.com/

It sure would be a shame if someone echoed all those urls, and these anti-creationist blogs got more publicity and attention because of a stunt by Adnan Oktar, now wouldn't it?

And now, I guess, poor Adnan Oktar, a.k.a. Harun Yahya, will have to go back to court to have Blogspot and Scienceblogs blocked, too.

Turkeys!

Other People's Gardens

... all the colours of the rainbow. Boundary Bay, South.

Guarding the gate

Tulip tree, a late bloomer, deep purple-pink

Big and bold

Garden wall

A shy purple petunia. I love this deep shade.

White. Almost papery.

Yellow

Leaping flames

A bee in her bonnet

White in the shade takes on a green tinge.

Turning over stones

Summer has come (when? I must have missed it) and gone. The geese are on the move again, and the nights are cold. Yesterday the clouds threatened rain. We went to Boundary Bay anyhow, in hopes that the sun would be shining there. It was. For a while.

High tide

Is this a snake, lizard or log?

Another snake-ish piece of driftwood

The tide was almost at its peak, leaving us a thin strip of beach, mostly rocky, to walk along. We poked among the stones, searching for crabs. The small grey crabs on the northern end of this beach are shy creatures; they scuttle for shelter as soon as the light hits them. Here, towards the southern tip, some hide; but last time I was here, I found green crabs that stand their ground and offer battle, waving their pincers menacingly. I poked at one with a fingertip, and it grabbed and held on. I lost that round.

The next time, I used an edge of a clamshell; the tiny, half-inch crab was more than willing to attack it over and over again.

I dare you!

On guard

I found other crabs this time, small, thoroughly camouflaged ones. They neither ran for shelter not waved pincers. They didn't need to.

Blending in

We passed a long stretch of lugworm egg cases, (Here, and here.) interspersed with coiled piles of fecal castings, tiny and large. Among the far-too-plentiful invasive battilaria snails, I was pleased to discover a few miniature, fatter ones, probably native to the area.

And, turning over barnacled rocks to see if I could get a good look at something that twisted and flashed out of sight, I found a pair of these:

I don't know what they are. This is the large one, and the white piles beside it are small barnacles. They were both soft to touch, and shrunk away from my finger, just a bit. The jelly-like flesh is transparent, brown, with greenish stripes inside the gel, not on the surface. The creamy top disappeared inside after I had touched it. They both had tiny bits of sand glued to their skin, shining like jewels in the sunshine. (Click on the photo to get the full effect.)

They look to me like anenomes, closed in for low tide. * But they are in the wrong place, on rocks just at the high tide line. And I have never seen an anenome so small, nor alone like these two were.

So I've got another week of Googling and reading and leafing through indexes to do. Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

It was getting close to supper-time. We turned back.

It was raining when we got to the car.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* Update: Hugh Griffiths identified them for me in the comments; they are Diadumene lineata, reported in the Exotic Species Guide (San Francisco). Thanks Hugh!