PhD Candidate @UF | Studying social spider behavior and community ecology 🕷️🏳️🌈
Joined March 2019
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191 Photos and videos
2 Apr 2023
Finding some nice polydomous colonies (colonies with >1 nest connected by a single capture web). It looks so cool when they make big ones with crazy looking capture webs
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31 Mar 2023
Love waking up to these birds. Not sure what they are though, any help birder friends?
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29 Mar 2023
Playing with hundreds of spiders just hits different
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25 Mar 2023
I’m finding more subsocial pale velvet spiders (Stegodyphus tentoriicola) than I ever thought I would!!! I previously only ever found maybe one or two in a whole field season. This time I’ve found nearly 50 along a 300m transect in a span of a couple hours 😳
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25 Mar 2023
Not surpassing that most people have trouble finding S. tentoriicola as their nests are pretty covert and you kind of just have to wonder into them on foot. They also seem to like grass where I’m finding them, which is the same color as their web. Feeling very lucky 😊
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24 Mar 2023
I’m currently up at 2am because I was so excited to enter my field data and play with it in R. Getting fresh data is such an adrenaline rush that I had forgotten about after the last 3 years
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23 Mar 2023
These spiders are smaller than a dime but collectively can bring down prey as large as my hand. Amazing
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21 Mar 2023
They’re nests can actually be hotter than the surrounding desert so they hangout just outside their nest
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21 Mar 2023
Stegodyphus dumicola forms silken nests that they surround with capture web. Sometimes they even make multiple that remain connected. I’m trying to understand what could cause this and the subsequent consequences. I’m finding some pretty cool multi-nest colonies this year!
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18 Mar 2023
My favorite part is separating them from their nest until they’re a pile of spiders
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18 Mar 2023
So it looks like my nightmare of finding all the spider colonies dead is definitely not happening
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15 Mar 2023
2020 was a hot mess for my fieldwork. Three years and four dissertation topics later, I’m finally getting data!
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10 Mar 2023
So glad to be back in one of the most amazing places in the world to study one of the coolest organisms. I already found my first Stegodyphus colony of fieldwork! Stay tuned for more social spider content :)
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