Ologies with Alie Ward - Kinetic Salticidology (DANCING SPIDERS) with Sebastian Echeverri

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

They dance. They flirt. They will steal your heart. They are spiders. Jumping spiders, specifically, and impassioned spider scientist Dr. Sebastian Echeverri is on board to tell you all about their sexy dances. How far can a jumping spider jump? What makes a good spider dancer? Why are they so cute? Can you sample their mating drumming and make a sick industrial-EDM track that feels like you’re in a Berlin discotheque? Buckle up for the grooviest Spooktober of your life. BUY the sick track “Habronattus: Multimodal Display” https://ologies.bandcamp.com/releasesCreated by www.jasonscardamalia.com/ and featuring recordings by Dr. Damian Elias with proceeds going toward spider research Dr. Sebastian Echeverri’s website https://www.spiderdaynightlive.com/Follow Dr. Sebastian Echeverri: twitter.com/spiderdayNight and https://www.instagram.com/spiderdaynightliveDonations went to: www.entopoc.org/ and Xerces.orgMore links and info at alieward.com/ologies/dancingspidersSponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsorsTranscripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extrasBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesFollow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTranscripts by Emily White of www.thewordary.com/

Oh, hey, it's that boba you forgot to specify, non-dairy, and you're drinking in any way, despite intestinal protestations. Alleyward, back with an episode of oligies. It's got a lot of surprises around a lot of quarters. Also that boba thing happened to me today. But first off, okay, first off, yes, we're back. We are back. The last two weeks, there have been some surgeries and some cadaver tendons implanted into my

husband's knee, some oozing, some healing. So we have had some spooky encores for bats and crow finerals, and our entire spooktober catalog has everything from bones to demons to death to pumpkins. It's all there for you. But this week, it's spooktober. What better time to get a fresh episode in your face? So let's get all up in spider business, or rather, let's let the spiders get up in our business as we talk about the movement of jumping spiders, or kinetic celticidology,

celticidology, I think, celticidology. So celticidae is a family of spiders. They're commonly known as jumping spiders. They hunt during the day, and yes, they dance. So celticidae gets its name from the late Latin word for dancing, and dance they do. Love them, you will. So I've been aware of thisologist for quite some time. He works with the American Arachnological Society.

He has a website, SpiderDNightLive, where he makes and sells spider merch. He's appeared on Crash Course's zoology series, oh, and he earned his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in spider behavior. He also sports a very dapper curly mohawk. And when he talks about the objects of his study, his whole face illuminates with love. So this conversation is an utter joy. Stay tuned also until the very end of the episode, because we made the best secret surprise we have ever concocted.

This episode is cooking out a day late because of it. So please enjoy. It's the end of the episode. Oh my god. But before we get there, a quick thank you to patrons who support the show at patreon.com slash ologies. You can join for a dollar a month and submit questions for theologist ahead of time. Also the secret surprise will be downloadable to patrons, just saying.

So thank you to everyone who keeps us up in the science charts by telling a friend and by rating the show and leaving reviews. I read every single one so I can pick a new one, such as this one, which reads, I was so stressed out by all of the news related podcasts I was listening to, I needed something that was a beacon of light in dark times. This podcast is it. Signed deeply saddened user. I hope less deeply saddened user or even just moderately intermittently saddened user.

Thank you for listening. Thank you to everyone else who left reviews, which I read. Okay. On to spider dancing. Get ready. Sexy choreography. We got mating motifs, twitchy legs, fancy knees, deep beats, hungry ladies, spider eyes, spider icons.

Why jumping spiders have just made off with your heart with scientist, nature lover, professional, arachnologist, aeroneologist, and kinetic, sultisidologist, Dr. Sebastian Etcheverry. Hello. Hello. Is this working? It is. Can you hear me? Okay, wonderful.

Yes, I can. We're both a minute early. Perfect. How excited are we if we're both here a minute early to talk about spider dancing? I've never been early to anything in my life except for spider dancing. You know what? Like legit kind of the same. Spider stuff.

I'll show up. Anything else. It's questionable. Okay. Okay, kinetic, arachnologist, could we call you that? So I was thinking about it, kinetic arachnologist is accurate, but kinetic araneologist might be more accurate in that it's spider specific because all my research at least is in spiders, even though like arachnids in general are my favorite type of animal, I don't know as

much as say like Lauren Esposito on like scorpion dancing and things like that. Good point. Yeah. After this, of course, we learned that celticidology is plenty cited. So jumping spider experts, they're all over the world. Oh, and as long as we are naming names, first thing I'm going to have you do, if you could say your first and last name and your pronouns. Absolutely.

My name is Sebastian Etraveri and my pronouns are he, him, his. And now you're a doctor. I am. Correct? Yes. Last May, I want to say, it gets to the point where you forget when you defend your PhD, thanks to all of the stuff that's happening. But yes, doctor, doctor.

Oh my gosh, did you dance during your PhD defense? It is on YouTube so you can watch. And yes, whenever I describe the dance of my study species, I do a human imitation of it, which is very difficult because I do not have enough legs, but it's not the same as the real thing. His dissertation title, how spatial constraints on efficacy and dynamic signaling alignment shape animal communication. And of course, yes, I will link his video PhD defense on my website.

Well, let's reverse a little bit to your history. Have you always loved spiders? Have you always loved bugged? Was it nature? Yeah, that's a question I get a lot because for a lot of people, spiders are this thing that they've maybe not had the best relationship with throughout their lives. But you know, I was lucky enough as a kid, my family was always very nature positive. And I didn't fear spiders growing up, but I didn't really know much about them.

They were just kind of like, oh, it's an animal, it's there. Like I'd see one every now and then like, oh, that's kind of cool. Even when I was an undergrad and I was kind of deciding that I wanted to be a researcher, I was studying birds and I did my undergrad research with like these birds in Namibia. And it wasn't until I was actually interviewing for grad school where I was talking to a professor, not even the lab that I was originally interviewing for. And they were like, oh, by the way, here's like a project that I just kind of been like thinking about.

Like it's not even on my website yet or anything. And they just like pull out their laptop and they hit play on some videos. And it was a video of a jumping spider dancing like up close macro super zoomed in. It was the first time like I'd ever seen like a spider that way. You know, I'd seen them as like these little little specs hopping around or like in a web, but never up close where you could really appreciate them. And it was like, I stood up in the meeting being like, oh my God, what is this? And that kind of was was the start of it.

It was just like this like like transformative moment when you see these animals for the first time and see what they actually look like and what they can do. Did you get the job immediately? Like, do you have to apply still? It was it turned out that yeah, the lab that I had originally applied for already had picked a student and then this person didn't like have anyone that they they recruited that throughout. And so yeah, they they were like, oh, would you want to join my lab instead?

And I was like, yes, yes, I would like to become a spider scientist. Yes, a resounding hell yes, eight thumbs up for sure. Tell me a little bit about spider dancing. I did not realize that spiders danced until like some peacock spider footage kind of went viral a few years ago. They're the famous ones. Yes, I didn't know that other spiders did that. So a lot of spiders have these like courtship displays that they have to use.

Typically it's the male using them and though in some species it's reversed where the females are the ones that are courting because spiders are like these excellent predators, right? They're super diverse group like 50,000 species or so been around for hundreds of millions of years and they've stayed around and gotten so diverse because they're really good at their main thing, which is hunting things that are about their same size or smaller. And that includes other spiders. So they've had to evolve these ways of talking to each other and saying, hey, one, I'm the same species.

Two, I am a mature individual that would like to mate and three, please so need me. And that has turned into, you know, I think in a lot of spiders, it's very vibratory. Like there's a lot of like playing of these like like drumming sounds and you've seen like tarantulas and plucking of web strings. And some spiders that have evolved really good vision, like the jumping spiders, you get this evolution from a song to a song and a dance and a choreographed performance that could get really, really elaborate. And so the jumping spiders are the most famous, but other well-sighted spiders like wolf spiders,

for example, also have a dance, though it tends to be less involved than jumping spiders. And then, you know, even when you see like a tarantula doing like their drumming display, it looks like dancing though. The tarantulas very likely cannot like perceive the visual aspect of it. But yeah, it involves our movement courtship display is a typical spider thing. It's just a few of them that have like elevated it to this art form. And you mentioned a song and dance. Was that theoretical or is there actual?

What? Yes, it is. It is wonderful. A couple of researchers that do this kind of work, the one that does it on the group that I work with, the Paradise Jumping Spiders, is mostly Damien Elias and his lab. He has some videos on YouTube. So this UC Berkeley South Tisodologist offers a wealth of free video resources with just the facts titles like spider fight, male and male, and jumping spider mating dances with

sound, hibernatus and a pizis. What are the sounds? OK, the video captions explain that they are substrate born vibrations produced by the male spider and recorded using a laser vibrometer, which translates vibrations into buzzing noises. Wait, what? Sebastian, break it down. So OK, let me back up and explain how this works. They are singing through the ground.

So they are vibrating their abdomens. They are there. Sometimes they have little like rasp instruments, like those washboard kind of things between their head and their abdomen. They used to make music and it's these vibrations that travel through the ground that the female is listening to with her legs and with hairs on her legs while she's watching the dance because a spider, they can both dance with their legs and vibrate their abdomen and they choreograph it like the really cool thing about a lot of them, the peacock spiders

do this. The paradise spiders do this where dance moves are matched up to motifs in the song. That's kind of the scientific term that's actually being used and it like follows like a pattern. Like there's an introductory movement where they move in a certain way and they make certain types of sounds and then they'll slowly get up close to the female and change their posture and change the types of sounds that they're making that gets more elaborate, more elaborate. And then like right before they are going to try to mate with the female, they do this

like really big over the top arm vibrating like they're flailing their arms over her head. So they are flailing their arms, they're drumming on the ground and just getting bigger and bigger until they are closer. And in the group that Sebastian studies, it's not just the arms. They got a little something extra sexy. They have these really fancy knees on their third legs and they show those off and they make these really loud like thrumming sounds.

And when you hear them like as a person, it's weird because like it's a vibration. So you have to translate the vibration to like human hearing and it sounds really experimental. Like I really want someone to like take this and like use it as like a beat for something. I need someone to do that with these guys because it's going to sound very strange, but I really want to hear it. So from Dr. Damian Elias's YouTube video, jumping spider mating display, Habernatus Perithric's multimodal display. OK, and you know how at the end of each episode, I burden you with a secret from my soul.

Stick around until after the credits because this episode has the best surprise we have maybe ever pulled off. You're going to lose your mind. A hardcore bop awaits. That spoiled the surprise, but you know, but you're going to love it. It's an experience. Oh my gosh, please. It's I mean, like my I haven't closed my mouth for like the last five minutes, just

understanding that they're drumming through the earth. Yeah, they drop a beat and also drop it like it's hot. I just can't. It's literally impossible to camp. The other thing, I mean, obviously very different in mammalian species, but spiders do have glorious bedonks. Oh, yeah. That's not what they're using necessarily in their dance.

They're using their arms. The rule that's going to come up with spiders is there are so many. They are so diverse that there's always an exception. So most of the time it's their arms, but the peacock spiders, for example, are the really famous one where they have these like flaps on their abdomen that like open up and they make this beautiful like picture display and they shake that around. But there are other groups that do that.

So in the Paradise spiders, the genus Hebronatus, there are a few species that show off their abdomen. So the most famous is Hebronatus decorus, which looks really cool. The decorated Paradise spider, I guess, would be the common name. And they're called that way because their abdomen is like metallic pink nail polish, like that is the exact shade. And what they do is they lift that up and they barely do. They do very little arm movement.

It's almost all booty shaking. And they do a back and forth, back and forth when the sunlight hits it right because it's metallic. It's got this like slightly aridescent property to it. It's beautiful. OK, so I needed to know if the spider's metallic rusty orange fuchsia shade has a nail colored match. And the closest I found was an OPI color called PCH Love Song.

I appreciate that as someone who lives in Los Angeles, although I never go to the PCH, it's just too far away. It's on the West side. But as long as this isn't a side about nail polish, the color of a spider's ass, I just want to tell you that I just learned OPI nail polish stands for Odontorium Products Incorporated. What? Odontorium? Yeah, the company once sold dental products and the co-founder Susie Weiss

Fishman gets to name all the shades. And one day I hope that they truly match this glorious color of this decorated Paradise spider or Hebronatus decorus. I hope that they call it something like have we not us decorum or deco rate me a 10 or maybe just you look like vermilion bucks. So there's a few that do the abdomen shaking, mostly its legs and petty palps. So the petty palps are like the like the spider equivalent of arms. Imagine if you had arms like right under your like right next to your face

because all of a spider's limbs are attached to its head. So they've got the eight legs and they've got the two petty palps. And in males, the petty palps can be like really big and like with tufted hairs and they can look really, really cool. And a lot of them like shake them around like pom poms when they're dancing. There's a lot of stuff that's come out of these the kind of evolution of these dances. Do different species have different motifs and beats? Yeah. Or is it generation to generation?

Like, will will a sun spider's dance be similar to his father's but different than his cousin's? What kind of commonality? What kind of patterns? Yeah, I'm so glad you asked because there's some cool stuff happening in there. So in general, these dances are an instinctive thing. It's not like in say birdsong where that in some birds, at least they like will learn the song and like improvise it and and mix it up. It is a like stereotypical dance for each species. And so it is a way that you can kind of identify an individual.

But there is some really cool things that happen when there are hybrids. So another cool thing about jumping spiders in particular is that the males are not how you would say very selective in who they will dance for. In that is it a habronauts female of the same of the same species of a closely related species? Is it a dead female on a stick that a researcher is using to get the males attention so that they can film it for their PhD project? Is it a like actually like very badly painted model of a spider that like looks

terrifying because it's barely a spider? They will dance for a lot and most of the time that goes nowhere. But every now and then there is hybridization and especially in these really diverse groups of jumping spiders, the paradise jumping spiders. And I don't know how much that happens in the peacock spiders. But I know in my group, the one that I study, there's a lot of hybridization. OK, and when he says there are a lot of hybridizations, that is a very diplomatic way of saying that there are a lot of males throwing down moves

and getting horned up for spiders that are not even the same species. And they are out there making all new, fluffy, hairy outfits and some sick moves. There's a whole group that I like to call the fancy knee boys because all the other ones, it's mostly first pair legs, face and petty palps that are like the fancy parts. But in the fancy knee boys, which is like a I want to say like a dozen or so species that are all kind of clustered together, the third pair of legs has these like really ornamented segments that are like expanded and they're big and they have like colors and some of them are like elaborately shaped.

And they do these like knee pops where they all like they like move them into the females field of view up and down. I mean, like that's their thing. Like the females love to look at the knees and the males love to show off the knees and like that's that kind of lineages specialty. You could trace kind of the evolution of the dance by looking at the family tree. Okay, I looked this up and I found a 4K video that Sebastian made featuring a pair of Habernatus prerithrix.

This is a type of paradise spider and the ashy brown female just stands there grooming her bulbous posterior as this green armed male keeps two front legs up in the air, twitching just the tips and then alternates lifting his right and left middle legs in rhythm to show off some orange knees. He's got a sense of style, romance, confidence. At this point, I'm ready to mate with this guy. I mean, he's looking good, but his potential lady, you know what she does? She just turns her back on him, doesn't care, continues to pick dust off of her own

butt, but she did not eat him. So he's having a good day. Do different moves signify different things? Like if you're showing off, you have really chunky knees. Does that mean that you like are really good at capturing prey? Like, do you find any commonalities that female spiders will be like, yes, very into that? Glad you showed me that.

That's a question that I think a lot of jumping spider researchers and like animal communication people in general have been trying to figure out like when an animal does a signal, like how does it encode the information that they want to actually tell the other animal into like what they're doing? And there's a lot of hypotheses about like how that could happen. OK, here's what they came up with, which is amazing. It's very often just like the overall effort that the male puts into it. So the elements of the dance themselves are not specific as far as we can tell.

Like it's not, you know, you wave your arms this many times and it means that you are, you know, faster or something. But the overall like effort and energy and how vigorous they are at dancing and how like potentially how choreographed it is seems to be what females are picking up on at least to make decisions about who to mate with. But a lot of these other aspects of the dance might have evolved for other reasons. So there's some ideas that some colors might be helping males to I mean, first of all, to like show that they're the same species

if the colors are consistent within a species. But also some of the males or quite a few of them have a like a really bright red face. Like their face is like this beautiful, beautiful red. There's some research kind of on both sides that this might actually be kind of trying to to trigger the same sort of reaction that females might have to like aposematic prey. So prey that is toxic, that also uses yellows and reds and oranges to say, hey, don't eat me. The males might have evolved this red, bright red coloration to send that same message of be like, hey,

before you do anything, don't eat me. And now look at my dance and please allow me to mate with you because the kind of predatory response of these animals is like super, super quick. So planning a first date as a spider is just as simple as suggesting, OK, first, let's not cannibalize me. And then you can maybe I thought, watch me dance and then we'd bone it out. I'll smear sperm on these leg like things growing near my mouth. I'll jam it in you consensually.

Thought maybe you could have 135 of my babies. Nobody commits spider side. What do you think? Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was going to ask how many of these spiders are doing their final performance? Like, is this their their great bow into the unknown? Like, I understand that the like Australian redback widow spiders will do some sort of like elaborate gymnastics

where they will fling themselves into the mouth. Yeah. They're the mother of their children. Like, yeah, the ultimate sacrifice. So in the jumping spiders in general, and I believe also in the other big dancers, the wolf spiders, in general, the males are not trying to get eaten. They are very much trying to dance successfully, mate, and then get out of there to do it again.

That doesn't mean that they don't get eaten. Females are in often in a lot of spiders and including these groups larger than the males, and they can almost always overpower them. And so males, they are very, what's the right word, tightly wound. And if something starts to go wrong, they might just like hit the eject button. And I've seen a male just like fling himself without aiming. They usually aim before they jump.

Just jump like to get out of there as soon as possible. Bye. Have a great time. Bye. The rate of how often they get eaten varies a lot with like how hungry the female is if she's mated before, how much space the male has to get out of there. But like it does happen like relatively often that females will at least be aggressive towards the males and the males will then have to choose to leave. Oh, man.

And there are times where like, yeah, the male will be eaten before or sometimes the male will be eaten after like the female will let him mate and then just be like, OK, I mean, I want some food now to, you know, I got to make these eggs so and she'll just grab them right there like while he's still copulating and so can't really get away. So it happens. There's a reason that whenever I was like focusing on like writing a paper or something, I would keep playing this one song called Dance or Die

by Family Force Five. If ever anyone knows that that is my mental jumping spider dance soundtrack. Because it can get to that level. They are very much trying not to die, but it is like it is a high stakes performance. Oh, my God. Now, what about your life? Has studying dancing spiders made you more of an extrovert when it comes

to wedding dances or kind of rug? That's a, you know, that's the sad part where I'm not a great dancer. It has made me an extrovert in the sense that if you count being willing and able to talk about spiders forever an extroverted trait, then I'm an extrovert. And I'm like, yes, if that's the conversation you want to have, we will have it as long as you'd like. But the dances don't translate super well to humans.

I've done some of it. I remember one Halloween I dressed up as my species and I tried to do some of the dances. But the parts that people can do are like not that interesting because it's mostly just waving your arms. And in terms of like me actually dancing, I think the last time I did was like high school ballroom dancing class, which was. Really? Yeah, yeah, I'm not that much of a dancer. I just love watching these spiders.

You know, it's like it's like like art, right? Like I am not good at many forms of art, but I do enjoy looking at those forms of art and similar with these spiders. But one thing I have learned so far is it really is a for effort in some species. If you look like you're putting effort into it, that's really the most impressive thing. And I feel like that might change the way that I get down. Yeah, it's about the sincerity. You know, if you if your heart to know it, your audience will be able to tell.

Yeah, and that's really all that matters rather than the size of maybe my movements or how on beat I am. Yeah, maybe I just need to strive for passion over perfection. In some ways, if we can take a lesson from this at all. Absolutely. Passion over perfection. People tattoo it on your neck or maybe some place you can read it or just on a post-it note on your desk is fine. Passion over perfection.

You mentioned that part of your work involves putting a corpse on a small stick and waving it around someone horny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are a lot of goofy things that I've done to spiders in order to figure out what they're thinking. My PhD was on why and how these jumping spiders get their audience's attention when they're actually about to throw down their like sickest dance moves. Because just like us, animals have both like mental limitations

into like how much stuff they can think about at any one time, but also sensory limitations, like how our eyes can't see everywhere once jumping spiders have similar and in some cases more extreme versions of that. And the takeaway is that they like if they're not paying attention, they're going to be missing out on part of the male's dance. OK, wait, so if a female spider is distracted or just turned at an angle, she's missing some of her soulmate's advances.

What is she distracted with? Eight tiny phones? Don't spiders have a pretty open schedule and like a dozen eyes? And in certain cases, they're actually missing out on all of the color because of how their eight eyed visual system works. If the females are not looking direct, like facing towards the males, they actually can no longer see them in color. Wow. So how does that work? Yeah, it's really cool.

So, OK, crash course on jumping spider vision. Bring it on. Jumping spiders have some of the best vision in terms of resolution of any animal on land without a backbone. And actually better than many animals, 10 times their size, better than many vertebrates, for example. If you gave a jumping spider a human vision test like you do at like the DMV or like in school to like test you the little letters on the pyramid chart thing.

Many, many animals that you think are much bigger, have bigger eyes would fail. So like some songbirds would fail. Elephants, I think, just barely fail. Cats are like borderline jumping spiders, at least the ones with the best vision just barely pass or at the very least are not legally blind. So their vision is within the normal human range of variation for resolution or how sharp that image is. Even though their eyes are 100 times smaller than ours,

their vision is only about 10 times blurrier. Wow. It's really impressive. So if you can see a jumping spider, they can see you. Is that nuts? Like they're maybe looking at you and admiring your bold haircut or wondering if you're going to be an evil landlord that evicts them from their summer home, also known as your shower. And especially if you see a jumping spider because they are very, very small animals.

I mean, I have a photo of one sitting on my fingertip that I took and her body is like 15 to 20 like ridges of my fingerprint long and her head and eyes are like, I don't know, 10 fingerprint ridges long to give you a sense of that. And the way that they've managed to pack in all that vision into a head that is that small is they've kind of cheated in that they've evolved to have like telescopes or binoculars for one of their pair of eyes.

So if anyone's worked with cameras or anything like that, small the camera, the blurrier your picture is going to be. Just because it's smaller. So these guys have evolved basically a second lens in the back of their primary eyes. If you're looking at a jumping spider head on, it's the really big, super cute puppy dog eyes that make them look adorable. Those two are actually these really long telescope like tubes because that's the only way that they'll fit in their head is if they give up

on being a sphere and actually just become a tube with a second lens in the back and the behind that they have this like layered retina. Because again, they can't fit it all flat. They've got to stack the cells to get all of the photoreceptor cells in there. And those are the only eyes that see in color. So the giant eyes on a jumping spider magnify things like in high res and they see color. Meanwhile, I, a human person, need contacts in my eyeballs to function on planet Earth.

And because they work like binoculars, like imagine walking around with a pair of binoculars strapped to your face. They have a really small field of view for how big they are. And they can move around a little bit, but it's about like a 60 degree cone in front of their face and only those eyes have the ability to see in color. The spiders, other eyes, including the ones that look the two on the side and the two on the back of their head, see only in black and white. And they're actually much blurrier than the primary eyes.

Are they like a backup cam? What are the ones on the back of the head for? They are like a always on backup cam. So the spiders can see around themselves at all points in time. The field of view is basically continuous, like where one eye kind of cuts off, the next one picks up. So they're really motion detectors in that they can see things moving that what the way they use them is they use them as motion detectors.

They can see stuff like moving over there. Those eyes actually have a connection in their brain that feeds partially directly to the muscles that control the legs and the primary eyes. And they say, hey, there's something like at your seven o'clock and it approximately looks like this shape. And it's approximately in this part of your field of view when you turn to look at it. And the spider will swivel in like a split second and lock their primary eyes onto that. And then they can see what color it is.

And then they can see it in higher resolution and get all this information. Wow. There's a lot of stuff going on. There's I could talk about their eyes for a long time. They're very cool. They evolve their own way of seeing color that is both completely unique and also kind of bad. So what they do is they have in that. So this is in the Paradise Jumping Spiders, the genus Habronatus, and they're like very close relatives.

They basically have like a filter over part of their retina. So imagine like if you've ever played with like a flashlight and you put like colored paper like cellophane in front of it and it changes the color of the beam. Yeah. What that's doing is that it's it's not changing the color of light. It's blocking everything, but like say in our case, red light. So in these jumping spiders, they have a red filter that only allows red light to pass.

If you put those cells directly behind a filter that only allows red light to pass and those cells pick up any light at all, the brain of the animal can infer that it is looking at something that is red. And my God, that is how they've evolved to see the difference between red and green. And it's cool. It's really inefficient. They actually cannot do it when it becomes too dim. Like in the shade, they lose this ability because there's not enough light entering their eye.

But they it works for them and they've used it to, you know, see all these colors and evolve all of these colors to talk to each other. So it's working, but it is it is very goofy. Oh, my gosh. Now, I'm glad that we are talking also about their eyes because can you tell me just a little bit about spider eyes? Some of them have eight eyes. Yeah. Some of them have six.

And also, this is a good time to address the elephant in the room, which is like, why are jumping spiders the cutest spiders? That was a great question. Yeah. We all we all know. They are they it's objective. We know that they are the cutest. Yeah, they're amazing. Everyone knows. Yes. Can you explain to us why they're so cute?

Yeah, OK, so I'll start from the cuteness. So I think the reason that a lot of people fall in love with jumping spiders in the way, the reason that they're like this great like ambassador spider, right? Is that they've got these traits that we've evolved to think are cute. So these really big eyes, they are colorful. They are fluffy because they've got these like colorful hairs and some of them have tufts. And they are things that are starting to overlap with like

mammal traits, you know, having like tufts of hair and fur, big eyes, say on a baby. And that is really interesting because we kind of have a like parallel evolutionary history in that humans evolve to be visual predators. We have some of the best high resolution daytime vision of like most animals. And so our jumping spiders, they are these amazing visual predators they don't use a web to catch their food. They are out there hunting, spotting prey in the distance and doing that.

And like chasing it down, sneaking up on it, ambushing it. And so they've evolved to have these really big eyes in proportion to their head. And because humans have evolved, you know, these kind of maternal or paternal care requirements where we have to like feel attachment to things that are similar enough to us that we want to take care of them. And evolution for visual hunting selects for similar traits, at least in terms of eye size.

And that makes it really easy to like put yourself in the jumping spiders mind because for the most part, they're interacting with the world in the same way that we do. And so it's easy to I think for a lot of people who may not be able to do this or may not easily do this for like other animals, see them as a little person, see them as a little little cat kind of looking around because they will look at things that they're interested in. They'll like tilt their head kind of like a dog will. They will, you know, sneak up on stuff.

They'll react to your movements. Like our brains are wired to tell us that that's cute. This is just the perfect storm of adorableness. Oh, man, they're one of those animals that as soon as you see a macro photo, you really could never squish another. Yeah. Yeah. And they're the ones that got me into macro photography. I started kind of doing a little bit of it for like lab work because we just had to

like look at the spiders that kind of turned into like this huge interest in macro photography. Oh my God. And yeah, it's been a lot of fun. If you've been wanting to get up close and personal with tiny animals, may I suggest the Aperiology episode all about macro photography? I'm going to link it on my website via the show notes. I wonder if he's heard it. If you haven't listened to Joseph Saunders, I was about to say, yeah, no,

I was so excited when he was the guest because I met him over Twitter, both as people of color who are really interested in invertebrates, but also as photographers. Yeah, his photos, I have yet to take something that I think is as good as his. I like my photography, but he's incredible. Yeah, that episode is really good if people haven't listened to it because it's yeah, it's fun. And he makes calendars now, which I'm so excited about. Yeah, so I'm like, yeah, I need a calendar for 2022 people get into it.

I have a lot of questions from listeners and I haven't read all of them. I had Jared sort them for me. Are you ready for some curveballs for the both of us? Yes, you are. OK, cool. Oh, also we donate also to a charity of your choice. Do you have one top of mind? I do. Is it possible to pick two or can I pick?

Yeah, yeah, we can split it. So the first one that I really would love is called entomologists of color. Because one of the things that you like learn really quickly as a person of color studying, particularly invertebrate animals, is that they're very few of you. What this fund does is that it pays for the dues to join professional societies for scientists of color who study insects, arachnids and other arthropods. Awesome. Because for a lot of people, that is like, you know,

$100, $200 fee to just be part of a community that you need to, you know, grow your career and to like meet other people and to make a change in your field. And that is a lot of the times like a prohibitive thing. And they also do this cool mentoring programs at like professional meetings and stuff like that. So yeah, they are at Ento POC on Twitter. If anyone would like to follow them, that would be great. The other one would be one that I know has gotten some love from the show before. The Xerces Society.

I always call it Xerces and then you pronounce it Xerces. And I'm like, I'm going to trust Ali on this one. Oh, no, I hope I said it right. I don't. I genuinely don't know. But it's a group that supports invertebrate conservation across the world. But the cool thing about arachnids is that if you help conserve insects, arachnids are almost always they're like really good predators of insects. So the conservation efforts for one of those groups will help the spiders as well.

Oh, that's great. Those are amazing. All right, you ready for some patreon questions? Yes, please. So we will split the donation, thus linked to two great causes. Those donations were made possible by sponsors of the show. We may hear about now. OK, your kinetic soltacidology questions.

No more dancing around them. Let's jump in. OK, R.J. Doge says, Dadward, this is the niche shit we live for. Do they learn the dance from their elders? Or do they just feel the beat deep within their souls? It's it's all from their DNA tells them the dance. Once they are mature adults, it's like, OK, I know this and they will just go.

Yeah, it's just part of who they are. Does it does it ever make researchers wonder, like, will we get to the point where we'll figure out, like, where this information might be stored genetically? Like, how can you even figure that out? I mean, it is genetics. It has to be in there. And I mean, you can look for genes that vary between species

and try to match them with, like, aspects of their dance. But it's going to be it's a lot. It's a lot to take to take that apart. There are some really cool people doing really, really cool work in like jumping spider genetics, so like Wayne Madison and a bunch of his students in particular are the ones who do a lot of jumping spider work, especially in the Paradise spiders. But we're still figuring out like how some of them are related to each other

and like finding out new species. We're unfortunately not at the point yet of like breaking down dance elements by genes, even though that would be so cool. I mean, it's got to be in there somewhere. It is. But, you know, Sid wants to know, what do you think of Lucas, the jumping spider videos? Aren't they just the cutest? They are. I do not know who Lucas is. What is it?

OK, so Lucas, the jumping spider, I don't know when it came out, but I started seeing it like people would start sending it to me. It's this these videos that's like an animator made of this jumping spider with like really exaggerated eyes and it's like voiced by his child. Hi, my name is Lucas. I have too many eyeballs. So it's like, I think the kid is just like maybe making up the script as he goes and then the animator animates around it.

And the impact that I've seen it have on people in general is been so wonderful because they have this like point of contact for like what a jumping spider is, what they do, and that they're like really cute, fun animals. And I love that like that. Anything that gets people to like start questioning the kind of cultural message of like, oh, no, scary spider. Is like just an incredible thing in my book.

OK, so there you have it, Lucas loving the patrons, including Alexandre Cthul and Kate Rampey. But yes, the animator, Joshua Slice, had his nephew, Lucas, voiced Lucas. And after a few years of making internet videos on YouTube to wide acclaim and people loving and crying over them, Lucas the spider became a TV show. And it just premiered on Cartoon Network and HBO Max like a few weeks ago. I just found that out yesterday. So get your babies some lovable, self-cynological content.

It's so cute. Why? Why is it so cute? Well, Shannon, Rhaeditoli, Issa Brahlar, Natalie, Sarah Mass, Danielle Larmine and Jesse asked in Jesse's words, why are they so ding dang cute? And Lauren Cooper needed to know, do they know I love them? So first time question, ask her. Brianna Lovens wants to know a bunch of questions that stem off of why are they so stinking cute? But they want to they want to know,

do they really wear water drops as hats? Because if they do and dance at the same time, I will be so happy. Do they wear water drops as hats? I'm unfortunately going to have to not make you that happy because that is getting into one of the like uncomfortable things about a lot of viral animal photos in that it's a posed thing that has been like artificially done by a person and pushed off as like this natural thing of like, oh, isn't nature so magical?

That really misrepresents like what's going on. So Sebastian says in the case of water droplet hats, it's not natural, but it's not harmful, really. And yes, it's very cute. It can help people see that spiders are adorable and they are your friend. But other photography practices do cross the line. He says some animals are even partially frozen and then manipulated. Are their dead bodies are posed in really unnatural relationships,

like with a predator and prey sitting down to tea to fulfill some of our human narratives? So would you do this with two formerly alive humans who had opposing religious or political views? I hope not. Sickos. So maybe leave the fiction out of the wildlife fix. I think there's so much like of what's actually going on in nature to wonder at and marvel at that we don't need to embellish it.

We just need to look for like the really cool behaviors that these spiders are doing because like they have some really fancy dance moves that like, I mean, there are ones that like do these like peekaboo arms where they like hide under a leaf and they like peek like one leg out at a time for the female. And that's adorable. And like that is, you know, completely unembellished. That's just like what it's the genus Jodas, I think. I think genus Cytus also does this, but they're very, very cute.

And like, yeah, just just enjoy the spiders for what they are. OK, so that brings us to Kate Rampe's question says, hi, animal lover here. I like to keep little jumping spiders I find in my showers and corners. In in boxes, like an amac box, amac box. Oh, yeah, I know, I've got some of those. Yeah. OK, yes, I looked it up. And an amac box is a clear rectangular display box. You can get them in like the container store or whatever.

And a lot of folks use them to house little small spides or slings, which I just learned via a spider person forum is shorthand for spider links. They're called slings. Those are babies. And if baby spiders imagine if they were the size of a newborn human, you could carry a sling in a sling. And then you could get your own row to sit on in the subway because you would have a giant baby spider and a Bjorn.

It would be killer. Anyway, Kate Randi, casual spider keeper says, I do coconut soil, a cork, a stick and a fake flower for them. And I miss them every day for water. I'll get them a few small crickets from the pet store I work at once a week and then release them after a few weeks. I was wondering, all caps, am I doing OK for them? Yeah, I will say your setup sounds pretty nice, depending on the size of your spider,

like depending on what size of your amac box, they don't need that much space to survive, especially if you're letting them out after a few weeks. But they are very active spiders. So if you're keeping them from longer term, they will use the space that they're given to like move around and stuff. But other than that, your setup sounds pretty good. What I would do is check your ventilation.

If you're misting them every day and your boxes, your enclosures have low ventilation, you might get a buildup of humidity and it really depends on the species that you have. There are some species that are adapted to really humid environments or some species that are like desert desert jumping spiders. And then just make sure that you're feeding them small enough crickets. That is one of the difficulties in keeping certain species in that the spiders are small, that you have to you can't like buy a cricket that's small enough and they have to breed crickets and that's its own kind of worms.

Small worms, very small worms, very small worms. But yeah, the setup that you've got there sounds pretty good. And if the spider, especially because you're releasing them after a few weeks, that is they're going back out to nature and they're able to like be part of their their gene pool and everything. So that that I really like to. OK, Stephanie Broches wants to know relative to size. What's their hop game like?

If there was a rabbit size jumping spider, how far could it wouldn't match the bunny's hops? And Jenna Palermo wants to know when did they start jumping evolutionary? OK, all spiders jump and they're just not letting us in on the fun Jenna wants to know. OK, lots of good questions. So let's start with like just jumping ability. So jumping spiders are pretty good at jumping forward. They're less good at like jumping straight up.

So they'll usually telegraph or they're going to jump the like aim and then jump forward. And it really varies with how heavy the jumping spider is. Like there's a sweet spot. If it's too small of a spider, they they don't have enough muscle strength or I guess also hydraulic blood pressure strength, because that's how they flex their legs to jump off the ground. If you're the sweet spot jumping spider, like the right size, you got long legs or like it's not too long, they're like bulky enough.

It's 40 times their own body length. Is the like upper limit of what I've seen reported. Most jumps are smaller, but 40 times your own body length for like a human is Sebastian, math, a bunch here. Yeah, about 100 yards, maybe. I think if I'm doing math right, that's right. To recap, jumping spiders have sweet dance moves. They have binocular eyes, hydraulic legs,

and they can leap the equivalent of a football field to come steal your girl. But also they know how to strut very casually. Their typical jumps are shorter, but they do like a succession of them. So they will jump, jump, jump, jump, jump to like navigate things really quickly. And those are usually only like like a body length or two in front of them, depending on how far of a gap they're trying to cross. Like hoppy, hoppy, hoppy. Yeah. So they can out jump a typical rabbit

just based on my memories of having a pet rabbit as a kid. It didn't jump that far forward. If they're like trying to get away from you, that's when the big jumps come up. And that's when you get like the huge distance. Wow. In terms of the question about like who in the world of spiders can jump. There are many species of spiders that can jump. So you'll see wolf spiders jump. You'll see lynx spiders jump.

I. I don't think tarantulas can jump. They can like push themselves off of things and they can run really fast and kind of throw themselves forward, but I don't think they can jump. So there is a probably a body size cut off, but a lot of spiders can do that thanks to kind of how their their muscles work. They have like regular muscles like we think of them, but they also use their blood pressure to rapidly extend their their legs.

So they use a muscle to like flex their arms, like pulling my arm in towards my shoulder. They have a muscle that does that. But when they're extending it, extending their legs, that's like a hydraulic pressure. And so they can get a lot of energy stored up and that's how they can move their legs really fast. So yes, death means the hydraulics on the leg machines ain't running. And we have mentioned this in a previous episode, but that is why dead spiders are folded in like a sad, broken umbrella. And what was the other question, the evolution of jumping spiders?

OK, so this is this is a cool one. OK. But we've got jumping spiders as old as 50 million years. And I think it's likely that they've been around before then, but they are a relatively recent type of spider. So spiders have been around for like, I want to say, like 300 ish million years. You know, older than the dinosaurs survived in little mass extinctions. They're really good at what they do. Jumping spiders a bit newer.

Oh, I had no idea their back story. And how they've been on the planet. Yeah. And speaking of their narratives, Andrea Negrete wants to know, do they have to build up to bigger jumps or are they just straight out of the womb, ready to dunk? The baby jumping spiders adorable are not at they do need to work up to it. So if you think an adult jumping spider is cute, you have not seen a baby jumping spider because just like human babies,

the proportions of their bodies are different in that their eyes are much, much bigger for their head size. And so they look even cuter. There's actually some research done by an undergrad in that was in the same lab as me, looking at how their eyes, the size and shape of their eyes changed from baby to adulthood. And yeah, when their babies, like their eyes are way bigger percentage of like the size of their body.

And that's because when there's that small, they're like working at the like the limit set by the physics of light on how well you can see at that size. So their vision is blurrier than the adults. And their limbs are like pretty short. And they they also have less like blood because they're smaller to like use in their hydraulic pressure system. So they don't jump as far. They like they and they can't see as far and they can't plan their jumps as well.

They are awkward little tiny baby spiders that are for some species very hard to keep alive because they eat incredibly small things that are hard to buy commercially. But if you get to see them grow up, you'll see them become more and more experienced and they do like learn from experience in terms of maneuvering and getting around the world. There's evidence that they can learn associations of like color. They can learn how to do things, how to navigate different challenges.

So that in terms of their dances are very instinctive, but a lot of their other behavior, they can learn from experience. Oh, my gosh, I love the idea of them being like, oh, I picked up a new move. Or I can do this now. Like, it's so it's so cute and exciting. Timothy Quang, first time question, ask her wants to know, does the Tarantel Agra have anything to do with tarantulas? Or is that just a weird coincidence?

Tarantel. Have you heard? It's like an Italian wedding dance. Oh, OK. So I think this goes back to the origin of the term tarantula. The term tarantula use is a European term referring to like large spider on the ground. And the large spiders on the ground in Europe were wolf spiders. There's a specific wolf spider called I think like Lycosa tarantula

is a species name. OK, that was the original tarantula. And there was this kind of urban legend slash thing that happened back in the day of the tarantula fever or something. But basically, the idea that if you were bit by this spider, it would cause like uncontrollable dancing. And so my guess is that that's the kind of historical connection. Yeah. Turantism, that's the that's the name of the thing.

And so maybe that leg shaking is also part of the connection. Maybe someone watched the courtship display and was like, you know, spider shaking its leg, maybe if it bites you, it make you shake your leg. I don't know. Oops, Timothy Wang. It was your first time asking a question and I did not realize until way later that you were asking about a Harry Potter spell and not a Southern Italian folk dance. So the tarantula legra is the fictitious dancing feet spell.

But the tarantula is a very real jam. They play at weddings. It's kind of like the habanagila in that there's a big circle of people running around and it gets more and more damp and frantic. And it's the best part of a wedding except for the cake. Also, the tarantula, the Italian kind, was once prescribed as therapy in medical textbooks in the 18th century. It was used as a prescription for spider bites and for neurotic women

suffering hysteria. So when in doubt, I guess just sweat it out. All right, all right. A couple more listener questions that Rylan Guy wants to know, are there spiders with eight left feet? Are some of them just really bad at it? A dancing. Yeah. Like, do they just suck?

I mean, that's the problem is I'm not a female jumping spider. So I have trouble being like, oh, that one's bad. I've seen ones that like give up really easily where they're like they'll just be like that this female will kind of like look at them sideways or just like kind of face them really quick. And they'll be like, OK, I give up and they'll just leave. So there is definitely like effort differences. I haven't experienced a spider that is just like,

does not know what it's doing in terms of a dance, except for like one very, very old male that like was so old that he like had trouble moving some of his legs, but was still trying to dance. And it was very sad. But I think he was he was 100 percent effort and like very little actual like skill and execution that the ones that I've seen, like they do a pretty good job. And maybe that's just me not being able to see like jumping spider vision,

you know, because they can also see at a higher frame rate than us. So they can pick up on smaller differences in movement than we can. So maybe if you've got jumping spider vision, it's like really obvious. But for Sebastian vision, you know, they're all impressive. How old was the older male like two and a half weeks or something? No, it's like, OK, I want to say like he was getting close to two years. We had had him in the lab for a while and that dude like I have videos of him dancing like as a younger male and then as an old man.

And the old man is very sad. They this, you know, jumping spiders in general tend to live for, I would say, on average about a year or two, somewhere between a year and a half. Like a lot of them will have like some of them will have a winter. Some of them will have just one year, depending on where they live. But in captivity, I've had a few that made it to like three and that they were very old at that point, like three and a half.

I've had an old female that was one of my outreach spiders that she made it to like I want to say like three and a half. Well, speaking of ambassador, last listener question. OK. Alessandra Kempzen wants to know, why do I find spiders so scary, especially if they're dancing? Why do they make me want to burn my house down? Laura Lemon wants to know not specific to dancing spiders, but why are people so afraid of spiders?

And Sarah Meaden asked, how do I help my kid and my partner not be so afraid of jumping spiders because they are cute, both the people and the spiders. So, yeah, how do you convince people that spooters are fronds? Yeah, I mean, that's a thing that I've been like thinking about and learning how to do as I became a scientist, a spider scientist. And then I started doing a lot of outreach. And what I've learned in talking to people and kind of looking at their research

that that's actually been done on this is that for a lot of us, for the vast majority of people, this is a learned fear. So this is something that we see a lot where young children below a certain age are either ambivalent to or may be interested in arthropods, so insects and arachnids and those types of animals. And then there's a certain point where they start learning from their parents and from culture and from their peers. They see someone have a negative response

and they see that that is why you should respond to that animal. And it's just this thing that's really hard to get away from because for a lot of people, the only real connections or interaction that they have with spiders are negative and they're either surprising or they're completely constructed by the media. So you have cases where like it's nighttime, you go to your basement to get stuff from the laundry machine, you turn on the light. A spider that was on the ground is scared and it scurries really fast across the floor.

That is a startling experience, like whether or not you are scared of spiders. That is something that is startling. And so you remember that like, oh, the one time that I remember seeing a spider, it scared the shit out of me. And that's your connection to them. And then you see movies where the spider bites someone and it kills them. And you see these like viral news articles that are like contain no research, essentially, or like quoting from a pest control website

of like, oh, yeah, this evil spider is here and it's invading the world, you know? Or that sort of thing that is there to to get attention, but not to be realistic or accurate, which is unfortunately like a big problem in journalism. And so that's it makes a lot of sense. Like once you think about it, we don't have positive interactions with them. What we've learned is that are all negative. And so the thing that I often try to tell people, especially if they're interested in overcoming that fear,

because spiders are incredibly successful animals, they are everywhere across the world. You are going to run into them. And so it is helpful for you to be able to, you know, see them and be like, OK, whether or not I'm afraid, I can handle it. So what do you do? What I say is to try to build positive interactions on your terms at the level that you're comfortable with and move on from there. So for a lot of people that is looking at maybe a picture of a cute jumping spider

or watching a video of it in with like in a documentary where that's portraying it in positive light and it's, you know, showing it being cute and dancing. And then, you know, oh, that makes you curious. Why are they doing this learning about them? Actually, some of the best arachnologists that I know, including many famous jumping spider scientists, started out as arachnophobes. Yes. And as they learned more about these animals,

they were like, oh, oh, wait a minute, these are like really cool. And they actually are like incapable of hurting me. And they are really fun to watch. And so that kind of learning experience can become the snowball of like, oh, you first you're like, OK, I know about them. I'm OK with them, you know, I'll just let them do the thing. And I was like, oh, wait, they did something cool. Why is that? Oh, wait, oh, that one looks different.

Why is that one different? And it becomes this kind of fascination for a lot of us. No. And I love that you are out there changing minds with your own love of spiders. I'm trying to. They like changed my life, honestly. Like everywhere I go, I can find a new spider that like I've never seen before.

Like that's the coolest thing. It's there are super accessible animals, like super accessible, diverse wildlife, because they're everywhere across the world. I can go literally to the slopes of Mount Everest. And if I look closely, I will find a jumping spider. I can go to like the shorelines of New Zealand. There are spiders there. I can go, you know what I mean?

Like, and they're all new, like I've never seen this animal before. And they're all doing like their own different take on being a spider. And it makes the natural world feel a lot more like magical and adventurous, you know what I mean? It's really easy, I think, like nowadays to feel like, oh, we kind of generally know what's happening. Yeah, those are the animals that are like birds and tigers and whatever. And you kind of have like a vague sense of like this is what animals are.

But when you start looking at spiders and insects and other like arthropods and smaller animals, the diversity of like what they look like and what they do and how they've evolved to just like live is staggering. And you like don't need to go anywhere for it. You can just like go to your yard or like down the street or to the park. And you'll find like dozens of species that are super weird and super fun to look at. Oh, that's so inspiring. Just get a loop, go out, look for some spiders.

But there's got to be something that talks about them. What is the worst thing about spider dancing, studying spiders, being an arachnophile, being a kinetic. A radiologist, a radiologist, a radiologist. Yes. Or jumping spiders, saltisodology. The worst thing about spiders. OK, so the worst thing about I would say jumping spiders is that sometimes they are very hard to catch.

OK, if you need to catch very many of them for research, they could move very fast, they could see you coming and they are able to hide in very tiny places. They are also kind of a pain to like compared to other types of spiders in particular or like a lot of other animals are just kind of like a pain to keep in the lab because like you can't keep them together. They are very good at eating each other. So you have to keep them all in their individual house

and feed them all individually. And there is like a tedium of after you get to like hundreds in a room that you have to all feed multiple times a week, it can become like its own, you know, part of your life. So that's definitely the part of like the the the research that like I think got me in certain points. Imagine having one hundred kids and they all need their own locked bedroom or else they'll eat each other raw with their hands.

But just like kids, the pain is outweighed by the beauty and the love. I mean, I don't know. I don't have a kid or one hundred spiders. What about your favorite thing about spider dancing? Good luck, dude. There's no. How are you going to figure this out? It's not fair.

That's the hardest question I've asked. It is the hardest one. Like in my favorite thing about spider dancing. OK, can I can I mean, I can tell you my favorite dancing spider. But my favorite thing about your favorite aspect, your favorite aspect about your work or about dancing spiders. Good luck. I know I'm trying really hard. Oh, no, I really like I've listened to the show before.

I should have. I knew she was going to ask this. I should have prepared for the I have other notes, but they're not for this. OK, well, OK, let's see what I really like. I mean, I kind of said it, you know, it's how they changed how I like go out in nature and how I see wildlife and where I can find wildlife, because I really cannot like exaggerate how much fun it is. I don't need to go anywhere exotic.

I just take my camera. I don't even need my big camera like my fancy camera. I just take like my smartphone and the clip on lens. And wherever I'm at, if I'm like at a conference, if I'm at traveling for this, if I'm at, I think, one time, literally at my friend's wedding during the rehearsal, I can just look over there and hey, there's a really cool jumping spider. I'm going to go see what it's doing. I am never bored because spiders are everywhere and all spiders are cool.

And so, therefore, it's just like permanent entertainment, you know? I'm never bored because all spiders are cool. It's true. It needs to be the name of your memoir. Yeah, that's actually pretty wonderful. Oh, my God, I can't thank you enough for being on. Thank you for opening up a world that most of us did not know existed. Absolutely.

So ask friendly folks, earnest questions, because when they're into it, they want you to be into it too. And also, we're all going to die. So what? Nothing matters in the best way. So just cut the bangs, text the crush, read about spider butts, look at the world a little different. I appreciate it as long as we're all here. OK, so get more of Sebastian at his website, spiderdaynightlive.com.

There will also be links up at my website to his iPhone invertebrate photography course through the Arachnology Society. He has crash course, zoology series he's in, links to his sci-fi trivia with Catherine Scott and more. You can also find Sebastian online at the handle spiderdaynightlive. His socials are linked in the show notes, more links all up at alleyward.com slash allergies slash dancing spiders. I made the spelling easy for us all.

We are at allergies on Twitter and on Instagram, where we post pictures of you and your allergies merch on Mondays. And we show off listeners art on Fridays. And all of October, you have been drawing allergies. Look up hashtag derologies 2021 and your mind will be bent by the beauty. People are drawing so many cool things. Thank you, merch ladies, Shannon, Veltas and Bunny Dutch of the podcast. You are that you can check out their wedding stories part two episode this week,

where I give all the exclusive details about my July COVID wedding with your pod mom, Jared Sleeper. We get real about it. Thank you, Aaron Talber for admitting the Facebook group. So wonderfully, thank you, Noel Dilworth for all the scheduling and social help. Susan Hale for handling allergies business. Emily White for making transcripts. Her company is called The Wordery. They are linked in the show notes.

Caleb Patton bleeps episodes. Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas and Stephen Ray Morris help make small allergies. Bite-sized episodes we defilth for the sake of your children. More of those will be up in a few weeks. Kelly Dwyer makes my website and is available to make yours. She's linked in the show notes, too. Nick Thorburn composed the theme music. Happy belated birthday to the fancies, Nancy, of the Ward variety.

Love you, mom. And finally, big thanks to my only husband, Jared Sleeper, who not only edited this episode, but also, as this week's secret. Here it is. OK, so, Jared, behind my back, commissioned a song by renowned film and television composer who has tracks on Netflix and HBO and is an electronica artist who works with Ultra, Jason Skardomalia, who literally sampled the spider vibrations, captured using laser vibrometry by celticidologist

Dr. Damian Elias's Berkeley Lab, featuring the beats of the hibernatus, Perithrix, Cognatus, Dawsonus, Pugilus, Schlingerri. That sounds like an incantation, but those are all species names of hibernatus, Paradise Spiders. So Jason Skardomalia has made an EDM track called Hibernatus Multimodal Display for us.

I'm going to give you a minute right now to adjust your volume. I need you to know I've been driving around listening to this all day with a bass so heavy that my rear view is throbbing. And your rear views are going to throb with this. It's the horniest, goopiest, sickest fucking track commissioned just for this episode available for free to patrons. I'm going to post it tonight to download available to buy at allergies.bancamp.com with proceeds going to spider research.

Buy it at the link in the show notes. You're going to want it. It is so sick. So hold on to your twitching posteriors for this still wet fresh track by Jason Skardomalia. Hibernatus Multimodal Display. Hibernatus Multimodal Display. Peacock Spiders do this.

Paradise Spiders. They can open the gaps in their lives and find their abdomen. Hibernatus, Hibernatus, Hibernatus, Hibernatus, Hibernatus, Hibernatus, Hibernatus, Hibernatus, Hibernatus. Hibernatus Multimodal Display. Hibernatus Multimodal Display. Hibernatus Multimodal Display. They choreograph it. That sounds really experimental.

Hibernatus Multimodal Display. They choreograph it. That sounds really experimental. They choreograph it. I'm my winner. Hibernatus Multimodal Display. Thanks for watching.