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Everything you thought you knew about Brown Recluse Spiders is wrong. There is now a book,The Brown Recluse Spider, to set you straight. This is my review of that book.

His name was Bob. I was a kid, he was an adult that all the other adults seemed to think was cool. He used to have a job launching nuclear missiles for the Air Force, but then later got a job as a Hippie. He, another person or two, and I were sitting on a rock pile out in the woods, checking out the patch of marijuana planted, mysteriously, on the neighbor’s property. The neighbor was the head of the local John Birch Society. Whoever planted the patch of pot figured it would be better found, if ever found by the cops, on his property than on the property occupied by the hippies.

Somebody moved a rock. Bob said, “Oh, look, a Brown Recluse spider. They are deadly, but they hardly ever bite.”

I watched the Brown Recluse spider very carefully for a while and memorized it. I found many more over that summer, and in subsequent years. I became very good at identifying them.

This is what it looked like:

The rock pile harboring the “Brown Recluse” was many hundreds of miles away from the natural range of the Brown Recluse. And of course it wasn’t a Brown Recluse spider. Brown Recluse have been known to take up residence in buildings very far away from their home range, but very rarely. They are not found out in the wild outside of their natural range very often. I think Bob said something about running into these things all the time at the secret nuclear missile base, which was secretly hidden in Wyoming. There are no Brown Recluse spiders in Wyoming, either.

I’m making Bob sound like some kind of idiot. He was not, he was a very smart guy. But he had this wrong and so does everybody else on the planet, it seems.

A study was done about ten years ago to see how bad people were at identifying Brown Recluse spiders. People, focusing on people who should know or claimed to know, were asked to send in their spiders. Brown Recluse spiders were submitted from 49 of the US states and from Canada. They exist, however, in only 17 states and not at all in Canada. There is a spider that lives in California, a very common house spider that had never been properly studied. It does look a bit like a Brown Recluse. So many of those were sent in (California is NOT one of the 17 states Brown Recluse spiders live in) that spider experts were able to use the collection of those spiders, not Brown Recluse but some other species, to do the first major study of its anatomy.

Most of the things people mistake for Brown Recluse spiders are spiders that don’t look much like a Brown Recluse, like the wolf spider depicted above. Many of the submissions from the aforementioned study, and many of the “Brown Recluse” routinely submitted to spider experts by concerned citizens, are not even spiders. There are a few spiders that look like them, but really, it is not hard to learn the difference between the Brown Recluse and its close relatives and all other spiders. But to do so you need some expert training, and that can be attained, if you are attentive, with Richard Vetter‘s new book, The Brown Recluse Spider.

You have probably gotten the email at some point in time. Brown Recluse Spider Season is starting. They are very dangerous. They can kill you. Be afraid, be very afraid. And let’s show you some picture of children with giant patches of rotting and missing body parts or holes in their arms because they were bit by Brown Recluse Spiders, etc.

Vetter’s book is full of information on the Brown Recluse. Vetter is careful to define terms and to not speak over the heads of the average person who is not a spider expert, but at the same time, the work promises to become the standing monograph on this type of spider. It is authoritative and comprehensive where prior study allows, and as such, also points out where there may be excellent research opportunities for up and coming scientists.

I was interested to learn that the majority of behavioral and physiological work done with spiders is done with captive beasts. I believe that is generally the case with invertebrates. But the conditions of captive life dramatically alter key life history variables. More field study needs to be done of spiders, but the difficulties would be significant. It would probably bad for your back and knees. But as an experienced archaeologist, I have no sympathy. Get out there and start collecting field data, you guyz!

The Brown Recluse is one of many related species in the same genus, and the larger family of these spiders is found in both the old and new world. The taxonomy has an interesting and elaborate history, with much renaming and shifting around of phylogenetic position.

Brown Recluse eat mainly invertebrates. They don’t build much in the way of webs, and don’t really use webs to capture prey. They either hang around waiting for something to come along, then possibly attack it, or prowl.

The dispersal patterns of Brown Recluse are very interesting. They may become very common locally, but not found nearby that locality. And by locality, I mean a single outbuilding on a farm, where they are common, not to be found in other outbuildings. That is a very small scale concentration of population. Studies looking at spider dispersal have found that some species of spiders disperse great distances, including those that use a strand of web to fly as much as thousands of feet into the air, presumably traveling great distances. Brown Recluse don’t do that.

The native range of the Brown Recluse and closely related species includes a small part of California, Arizona and New Mexico, all of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, southern Illinois and Indiana, most of Kentucky and Tennessee, Western Georgia, and all the areas I just circumscribed with a circle of states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri. The Brown Recluse itself, however, Loxosceles reclusa, is mainly restricted to Texas north to southern Illinois and east to Kentucky and Tennessee. Oh, and a tiny bit of the Florida Panhandle.

Here is how you pronounce the latin binomial. Say “Isosceles” like in the triangle. Not say it neat, without “ice,” and lock it down with a “Lox” in front. I imagine scholars differ on REEclusa vs. RAYclusa.

According to Vetter, “Outside of its native range, the brown recluse spider is rarely found….In comparison, to find forty buildings populated by brown recluse spiders in Kansas or Missouri, one would have to walk down just one residential street.”

Vetter makes two very important points about this spider that you need to understand.

First, many, many Brown Recluse spider bites, serious afflictions that are treated as spider bites, are not Brown Recluse spider bites. The misdiagnosis is generally done by a professional medical worker, and often in conduction with someone identifying a spider as a Brown Recluse incorrectly. There are other medical afflictions, including other bites but also things that are not even invertebrate caused, that are mistaken for bites of these shy spiders. That can lead to serious negative consequences for the patient. Also, for any invertebrates living in the area along with any one who breaths in the anti spider gas and juices that may be liberally spread around to kill a spider that does not exist locally.

The second is that we actually know too little about the physiology of the Brown Recluse spider bite, and need to know more. Vetter has a whole chapter on this.

The bottom line is that Brown Recluse spiders are extremely common in some areas but hardly ever bite anyone, and totally absent from vast areas where they are blamed, incorrectly, for the occasional lesion.

There are definitely dangerous spiders, and the Brown Recluse is one of them. But the human reaction to spiders in general, and even to the species that do have a nasty bite, is almost always overblown, as least in Western culture.

I believe that the vast majority of “spider bites” people get are not spider bites. Here’s why. The ideal mosquito bite involves the mosquito getting her proboscis deep into your skin, hitting a blood vessel, and withdrawing a good meal of blood. That takes a long time and is often not successful. The unsuccessful “bites” may leave a mark and be itchy, and that is what most people think of as a mosquito bite. But a successful bite will generally leave a welt, large, red, painful, itchy, and that stays around for a few days. When people get those, they call them spider bites. Why? Because most people simply don’t know what a real mosquito bite is, and think spiders bite them all the time.

That is why The Brown Recluse Spider by Vetter is a great book. It is clear, well written, authoritative, and you can’t help but be much better informed by reading it. If you live in Brown Recluse land (see map above) you need this book now, just go get it. If you don’t, and you are into inverts, science, or anything related, you’d enjoy it as well. Great book, highly recommended.

However, one of the main features distinguishing between monkeys and apes is the intermembral index. This is simply the relative proportion of the forelimbs and hind limbs. Apes have short legs and long arms (unless you are a Man in a Yellow Hat variety of ape) while monkeys have more even length limbs. This image compares a young Chimpanzee to stand in for the apes, a Barbary Macaque, and Curious George, with the limb lengths marked off with a red line.

This seems to indicate the George is an Ape.

Also, note that the Man in the Yellow Hat originally kidnapped George in a Jungle that appears to be in Central Africa, to which he returns in later episodes.

There is another possibility, that Curious George is an undiscovered type of primate that is technically a Monkey but with certain Ape features. We are not certain of the genetic heritage of the mysterious ape Sungudogo, so perhaps George is one of those.

Note that these comparisons are being made among Old World Primates. If New World Primates are included in the mix, there may end up being more questions than answers.

From what we know about elephants in general (including mammoths), individual mammoths also come a long way from birth to death. I hesitate to use the highly misunderstood word nomadic, which for racist reasons tends to invoke randomness and the strange (and non often existent) practice of never returning to the same place more than once other than by accident. But elephants are potentially nomadic, in the sense that they their daily activity range on average is a tiny fraction of their yearly home range in size, or that every now and then they may move a great distance, depending on resources and other factors. In fact, many modern elephant herds are far from nomadic, either because of the availability of resources or because they are trapped in parks. The point is, understanding the way of the elephant, sensu lato, necessitates understanding their patterns of movement across the landscape, and how they access resources on that landscape, and the relationship between where they move or stay and their social behavior, which in turn links to the animal’s development from birth to old age and ultimate entry, for some, into the fossil record.

And that is informed by a study just out, which takes this journey of understanding a good distance from mid 20th century views of mammal ecology, using techniques initially applied in the 1980s and that have come to full maturity: stable isotopes.

There is a handful of elements that get used a lot in biology, and that occur in nature as a number of different stable isotopes. Atoms make up everything, and exist as distinct immutable elements (unstable elements can change, of course, not the topic of conversation here). But many elements have very slightly different versions, which remain stable, and for most purposes, substitute for each other in chemical reactions But not quite. As these items are moved around in biological systems, passed from one molecular surface to another, or hooked up to each other or other elements to make various molecules, or separated from other atoms, during the process of life itself at the finest level, whether or not a given atom is used or ignored is very slightly biased by which version of the element it is. The difference is so small and insignificant that you can create a biological system in which virtually all of the atoms of a given element are of one stable isotope only, and the system works just fine. But if you provide a biological system with two different isotopes of that atom, let it run for a while, you might find that the tiny molecular machines that make up the works of a cell have been biased for or against one or another element, so the biological mass left at the end — some tissue such as bone or muscle — is made out of a biased subset of those isotopes.

Hand an isotope expert a sample of carbon-containing material and they can tell you if it comes from a sea creature or a land creature based on the isotopes. Hand some stuff from sea mud to an isotope expert and they can tell you if the Oxygen in the skeletal remains of the included dead organisms were formed during a glacial period vs. an inter-glacial period. The utter coolness of isotopic research is unsurpassed. Isotopic research is to animal ecology what genetics is to many other aspects of biology.

So, a large number of researches led by (wait for it…) Matthew Wooller, have applied isotopic analysis to the tusk of an individual woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) to reconstruct where it went from the time it was born to the time it died, and it lived close to 30 years, in Alaska.

There are two parts to this study. One is to look at the values of the isotopes over time to see how the different life stages went, and the second is to use a fancy simulation to estimate where the animal actually went in Alaska. In my view, the first part is a very important and likely stable result that, when added to other similar results from other individuals, will eventually contribute in a major and long lasting way to an understanding of mammoth life history. The second part is very cool but is necessarily more speculative. For example, it requires faith in a particular reconstruction of ecology of the region at the time, which itself is necessarily speculative.

The following graphic shows the isotopic history of this mammoth.

High vs low values for each element reflect the bias between one or another isotope (not the amount of that element in the sample). The meaning of a shift in isotope can be very controversial or more straightforward. The overall squiggliness of the lines reflects a combination of strong seasonal variation and stochastic or multi-year variation in various aspects of ecology. The things to look at in each squiggle are overall amount of variation across time, and shifts that correspond to the major life history stages of the animal, which are indicated in background color of the graph.

Shifts in Nitrogen values can indicated starvation of lack of food (higher values). A decrease on Carbon value can indicate the same thing. Oxygen can indicated climate change, but the life of one mammoth is too short to spot that signal. It can indicate geographical variation. Strontium represents specific habitats and/or geological location, so as those values change, we assume movement across the landscape to different areas.

From the paper:

Data from the first ~10 cm from the tusk tip showed minimal Sr/ 86Sr variation, suggesting that the young mammoth mostly occupied a range in the lower Yukon River basin in interior Alaska. As a juvenile … the mammoth used a larger range spanning some of the lowlands of interior Alaska between the Alaska and Brooks ranges … The mammoth undertook regular north-south movements within this large core area as well as several long-distance movements, sometimes reaching the eastern end of the Brooks Range and the northern Seward Peninsula in the west … These juvenile-age movements probably represent the movements of a herd (16–18).

With increasing maturity, our study mammoth broadened his range. After ~16 years, a distinctive transition occurred involving higher variance in 87Sr/86Sr along with other isotopic changes. This implied change in the animal’s range probably reflects a transition to reproductive maturity accompanied by long-distance travel between interior Alaska and the North Slope of the Brooks Range. These movements were probably in response
to seasonal changes in resource availability.

One result of this paper is to confirm and underscore the importance of long distance travel in a mammoth’s life. This supports the idea that mammoth confined to small areas (including islands) are selected to become smaller over time (the island effect), which scales the animals to their environment. Isolation to smaller areas of suitable habitat may be linked to the eventual extinction of mammoths.

Lifetime mobility of an Arctic woolly mammoth by BY MATTHEW J. WOOLLER, CLEMENT BATAILLE, PATRICK DRUCKENMILLER, GREGORY M. ERICKSON, PAMELA GROVES, NORMA HAUBENSTOCK, TIMOTHY HOWE, JOHANNA IRRGEHER, DANIEL MANN, KATHERINE MOON, BEN A. POTTER, THOMAS PROHASKA, JEFFREY RASIC, JOSHUA REUTHER, BETH SHAPIRO, KAREN J. SPALETA, AMY D. WILLIS SCIENCE13 AUG 2021:806-808. Published on line here.

We may need to admit that horse-racing has become corrupt. Well, certain areas of horse racing were always corrupt. Don’t ask me how I know, but I think the statute of limitations is up on that anyway.

And now, Cancel Culture is ruining everything!

Maybe we should cancel the Kentucky Derby as it exists today. Shut it down, tweak the rules, clean the process up, and restart in a few years. Maybe be nicer to the horses.

This new coffee-table format kids book, The Animal Awards: Celebrate NATURE with 50 fabulous creatures from the animal kingdom, by Martin Jenkins with illustrations by Tor Freeman*, is a rollicking riot of excellent information about (fifty) animals, with fun illustrations.

The ceremony is about to begin. Roll up, roll up, roll up! The ceremony is about to begin so prepare to be amazed. We’re here to celebrate the crème de la crème of the animal kingdom, and shine a spotlight on the finest achievements and unique qualities of some special individuals. Among others, we will be awarding prizes to the fastest, the oldest, the strongest, the smelliest, the tallest, and the longest. We have some unusual prize winners and some quite scary ones, too. As we run through our short lists you’ll have the privilege of meeting our esteemed guests from dangerous, frogs to organised ants, to spiders that have devised all sorts of strange and admirable ways of catching their food. It’s been a really difficult job choosing winners but we hope you approve and find plenty to marvel at in this beastly line-up of champions. Now put your hands together and clap! The Animal Awards is about to begin…

Tor Freeman is a London-based illustrator. In 2012 she was awarded the Sendak Fellowship. In 2017 she won the Guardian Graphic Short Story Prize. Her books include the Digby Dog and Olive series.

Martin Jenkins is conservation biologist and children’s writer. His jobs have varied greatly: “I’ve been an orchid-sleuth in Germany, a timber detective in Kenya and an investigator of the chameleon trade in Madagascar.” His titles include Emperor’s Egg, winner of the Times Junior Information Book of the Year Award, Can We Save the Tiger, winner of the SLA Award, and Gulliver’s Travels, winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal. He lives in Cambridge and London.

There have been a lot of encyclopedias of animals in print, and now there is a new kid on the block, and it is probably the one you should get for your emerging naturalist. Encyclopedia of Animals by Jules Howard, illustrated by Jarom Vogel*, covers 300 species. Unlike my old volume, which only had large mammals and a snake or two, this volume gives a much more uniform treatment of “animal” with roughly equal treatment for six Classes. The book uses bleed-tags to quickly find the inverts, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals.

There are over 500 illustrations across 192 nicely laid out pages, interesting facts about each animal exemplar, including Latin binomial.

It is hard to define the age range for this book. Adults will find it useful as a reference. Kids from about 3rd grade and up will browse it. It aligns with the kinds of science taught in fifth grade and up (10-11 years old.) A middle school science teacher will want this handy in the classroom library.

Jules Howard is science writer and presenter, regularly contributing to The Guardian and BBC Wildlife Magazine. Jarom Vogel is an illustrator, designer and digital artist.

There are three categories of science book authors: Scientists, who write the best ones most of the time, science-steeped (often trained-as-scientists) science writers, who can write some pretty good books, and journalists who delve into the science and sometimes write amazing books, other times write books that are good books but not necessarily good science books. Superlative: The Biology of Extremes is in the higher end of the last category. It is about the scientists, the teams, the work more than the cells and polymers.

Also, LaPlante has another set of credentials: He is deeply, severely, hated by Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. Oh, also, the book is at present deeply on sale.

Animal Beauty: On the Evolution of Biological Aesthetics (The MIT Press) is sort of the opposite.

This is a series of essays by biologist Chrisiane Nusslein-Volhard, engagingly and skillfully illustrated by Suse Grutzmacher (and translated by Jonathan Howard) about the aesthetic sense talked about by Darwin, its evolution, distribution, function, meaning, across animals. The essays take a Tinbergian approach to explore most aspects of how thinks look or are looked at, how paterns, colors, and other features play ar ole in sexual selection, and how the underlying genetic connect to these important surface features, allowing us to understand the phylogeny of this physical-behavioral nexus. This is the scientist talking about the science. The book itself is also a bit unusual, as it is designed to fit comfortably in a pocket or purse. Take it to the dentist office or hair stylist! (When the Pandemic is over.)

Once upon a time there was a psychology research lab looking into stress. They did this experiment:

Get two distinct samples of rats, as identical as they can be, in every way but one. For one group, do nothing special. For the other group, have an undergraduate volunteer arrive daily and spend a fixed amount of time cuddling with the rat, saying nice things to it, petting it, etc.

At intervals before, during, and after this period, give the rats a standard test like you do. This test involves placing the rat by itself on a floor bound by four steep walls. the floor is divided into many tiles, each just a few inches across. At regular intervals, record which square the rat is in. Over time, one can draw as sort of map showing where the rat spent most of its time.

Non-cuddled rats were found to do what rats usually do in this test. They spend more of their time around the edges of the floor, near the walls. This is what rats do, spending their time moving along walls and in shadows out of fear.

The cuddled rats, on the other hand, spent their time more or less randomly across the floor, and were also observed to spend more time looking up and around on their hind limbs.

Interpretation: If you give rats loving care they become well adjusted human toddlers. Therefore, if you give human toddlers loving care, they also become well adjusted human toddlers.

Some time later, a different research group, or maybe the same research group after a few beers, became suspicious of those findings, and decided to have another look at rats.

They performed the same exact experiment, but with one change. Instead of an undergraduate volunteer showing up daily to cuddle half the rats, the volunteer simply picked the rat out of the cage, placed it in an empty coffee can, put the lid on the can, and shook the can around a bit. Not enough to harm the rat, but enough to freak it out.

After the same time had passed with this treatment, the rats were tested in the same way.

The rat-in-the-can rats, the ones shaken around like Folgers, had the same change as the cuddled rats, showing little stress or fear, not hugging the walls as rats normally do, and being curious and looking around more than normal.

Interpretation: Being picked up by an undergraduate, held in the hands, touched with the other hand, made noise at, maybe occasionally brought near the mouth for a kiss, is a rat’s worst nightmare. The giant predator has come out of nowhere, captured you, and is certainly going to eat, crush, or otherwise abuse you. Every day For days. Or, being picked up and shaken in a can every day, day after day, is in the end very very stressful.

Either way, the rat becomes over-acclimatized to stress, and beings to exhibit the utterly abnormal behavior of not avoiding further attacks by predators.

Meta-conclusion: Although endocrine systems in humans and rats are very similar and behave in similar ways, rats and humans are not very similar and at the level of the whole organism, do not behave in similar ways.