The Arthropods

I knew when I signed up for this that there would be midges involved, but nobody mentioned anything about spiders.  I have a limit on 6 legs on bugs.  Anything with more legs than that is a freak of nature and probably out to get me.  I'd seen plenty of insects yesterday morning while we were burying resin bags - little pouches full of beads which measure the nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil - when I got my first black fly in the eye, followed quickly by snorting my first black fly and then by swallowing my first midge.  There'd been a rumor that the undergrads would have the afternoon off while the grad students worked on old data analysis and papers so I thought I was in the clear when Jamin asked if I could help him with something quick.  That something was to go outside and help him catch 50 wolf spiders. For those of you who may not know me in person, I am absolutely petrified of spiders.  Those who do know me are aware that my normal reaction to spiders is to run and scream.  To quote Hyperbole and a Half, spiders are little pieces of death wrapped in scary.

But science required spiders, and so I went out with a couple old yogurt containers to hunt some spiders.  We collected 64 total!  12 of them were my catches.

Me holding the spider bucket

Little beauties

The spiders were then split into their individual cups.

We needed the spiders for an experiment on midge predation - do spiders eat more midges when they are available, or do they stick to their regular food sources?  Previous results suggest that maybe the spiders aren't dining on the midges, but are only distracted from the regular food by them.  To test this we put spiders in a jar with fruit fly maggots (which they love to eat) and midges separated by a mesh to see if the presence of the midges distracted the spider from eating as many maggots as it would without the midges present. This meant that we had to catch some midges (seen above), which is done by going near the lake and waving a net back and forth.  It took 4 people about twenty minutes to catch 3 buckets of those midges, and they're not at their peak yet!  We also had to put 10 fruit fly maggots in each experiment, which is a rather difficult task when you've got over 60 experiments.

I maybe an expert spider, midge, and maggot wrangler by now, but there is one place where I draw the line: mouth pipetting spiders.  For those not aware of mouth pipetting, it is sucking something up in a glass tube with your mouth - if you suck too hard, whatever you're pipetting ends up in your mouth.  Actually there's a mesh preventing that, but nobody told me about the mesh before sucking up a spider in front of me.  They say the look on my face was priceless.

Here's a lovely midnight sunset to offset all the spiders