Adam Roy

*Nods vigorously in journalist*

If your stance is that for-profit newsrooms should provide access to important stories for free and only paywall trivia and trash, the inevitable result of that is a news media that prioritizes trivia and trash in hopes of staying afloat.

*Nods vigorously in journalist*

It brings me no joy to announce this, given his politics, but it's Yukio Mishima.

Tragically tied with fellow problematic fave, Alain Delon

New house day for Jolene the black widow! She's less than psyched but she'll come around.

Black widows don't actually need that much space, and Jolene has been living happily in a 1-pint mason jar since I collected her this summer. We're upsizing half because I'd like to see her make a bigger web and half because I really need her to stop webbing herself to the lid.

"Spiders might dream, maybe" evidence is starting to stack up!

This is a great story, and also a great excuse to talk about one of my special interests: Carparachne aureoflava, better known as the wheel spider.

A lot of people are what I'd call spider-blind. Spiders are pretty much all the same to them—nuisances or background noise. The wheel spider is a great example of how much they're missing by writing off one of the most common kinds of animals in our daily lives.

This is a great story, and also a great excuse to talk about one of my special interests: Carparachne aureoflava, better known as the wheel spider.

Which brings us back to the wheel spider. The wheel spider lives in the Namib Desert, a harsh place for an arthropod to make a living. But it has advantages: If a wasp tries to turn one into a living nursery for its babies, the wheel spider will tuck in its legs and cartwheel down the nearest dune.

This is a great story, and also a great excuse to talk about one of my special interests: Carparachne aureoflava, better known as the wheel spider.

Adult Pompilids don't actually eat spiders—they feed on nectar. Instead, females use spiders for their young, seeking out out a spider, paralyzing it with their sting, and dragging it into a burrow. The wasp lays her eggs in the spider before shutting it in, Cask of Amontillado-style.

This is a great story, and also a great excuse to talk about one of my special interests: Carparachne aureoflava, better known as the wheel spider.

However, wheel spiders don't roll to help them catch prey. As with the dwarf reed snakes @sabs.bsky.social writes about, rolling appears to be a defensive behavior. In the spiders' case, it helps them escape from a very scary threat: pompilid wasps.

This is a great story, and also a great excuse to talk about one of my special interests: Carparachne aureoflava, better known as the wheel spider.

Wheel spiders are a kind of huntsman, the same family that those enormous Australian spiders you see online belong to. Unlike them, though, it's very small, 2 cm max. (📸 Daniel S. Katz)

A year or so ago, an all-black stray* cat appeared in our yard. My wife called her Salem; my son, who was just learning about anime, misheard and renamed her. This is all to say that she's back and all the neighbors are listening to me try to convince Sailor Moon to come over and let me pet her.

Update: I have removed the sac and placed it in a separate, better-sealed jar while I decide what to do with it. After attempting to fight my tongs to the death, Jolene has gone back to her usual routine of sitting motionless in her web.

I do feel a little bad for stealing her babies, but the alternative of having 400 black widows escaping into my garage was a little much even for me.

After USFS rangers helped immigration agents arrest a group of campers over Labor Day, @emilyrandallwa.bsky.social and 12 other members of Congress are pressing the Forest Service to explain its policies around cooperating with ICE.