Can't Sleep, Thinking About Spiders

So I haven't been doing a lot of sleeping. I've recently gone on a new medication to treat my sexy depression, fluoxetine, a knockoff prozac. It's helped out with my depression, but I've ended up contracting a really nasty set of anxiousness side effects. Which sucks, really, as I was hoping for the common "weight loss" side effect to hit me hardcore and take care of my love handles. All the same, if I'm not super busy, I'm having a panic attack. My therapist says if these don't clear up soon we're going to try putting me on tranquilizers to sort them out (which makes me sound like some sort of bad puppy needing a shot to calm down, but I digress). Until then, I'm just doing my very best to stay as super busy as possible.

My most recent self-induced project involves something I've nicknamed "The Spider Tunnel". This is a tunnel running out to the C&O canal in Brunswick, MD. One of my friends, Carolyn, a geology major, discovered the tunnel and its plethora of tiny, eight-legged creatures. Basically, on the outside, it looks like this:


-me, with the aforementioned cute guy who did not go to Germany.

And on the inside, it looks like this:


-courtesy The Leaky Cauldron

Or, okay, like this, actually:





The spiders pretty much cover the entire ceiling from the mouth of the tunnel to about twenty-five meters in. I figure they must feed on each other and on the mosquitoes that come in from the canal. All the same, I'm absolutely fascinated by their habitat of living and the community they have in this cave.





While it's difficult to see in this shot (and next time I go in, I'm taking more than just my camera phone), there's actually a secondary orb web attached to that tangle web on the ceiling. While many spiders do live in communal webs, I haven't read too many articles on webs of different species attached to each other. I've purchased a few new books, and will be doing more research.

What particularly bothers me about the spiders should be, in theory, really simple to answer. What the hell species are they? The spider we caught a few months ago (that is sitting in alcohol on my desk as I type) was originally thought to be a trapdoor spider by one of my biology professors. From a strictly phenotypic side, I'd say yeah, it does. Most specifically, a California Trapdoor Spider.



It looks right, but there are two problems. #1: Trapdoor Spiders create trapdoors on the ground (hence the name) where little bugs can walk across them and get nommed up like whoa. The Brunswick spiders are on the ceiling of a cave in tangled webs. Also, #2: California Trapdoor Spiders live in, well, California. Not Brunswick, MD.

So, after some searching (read: three days, no sleep, internet internet internet), I think I've uncovered what these little guys are. Hacklemesh Weavers. The markings appear to be consistent on the Brunswick spiders, as do the hairy legs and the webs they make. I'm going to need to capture a few more and see what I can do to run tests on them.

It shouldn't be this difficult to figure out a spider species. I mean, they're so like so many spiders I've found in books, but they're different, too, and their behavior is odd. In my head, they've become something like a cartoon villain.



Bastards. I'll get you next time!

Oh, and in a funny aside, I was showing my co-blogger Jen (a microbiologist who thinks that science you can see isn't even remotely interesting) the way the webs were on the ceilings in her kitchen the other day when suddenly, and without warning, she hugged me.

"If anyone tells you that you shouldn't be a biologist, MJ, remember this moment," she said. "You just tried to explain web construction using a set of dish towels. THIS IS SCIENCE."

Hell yeah.