MSTF ASU June 18

The third day at ASU. We had the privilage of silking blackwidow spiders. It was definitely a different experience. Janelle the lab graduate assistant was instructing and answering all of our questions. Janelle was knowledgable and enjoyable to work with. The procedure was as follow: 1. Capture the spider.
2. Put the spider in a passed out state for lack of better words with carbon dioxide in a closed container.
3. You have approximately 30 seconds to pin the spider down with masking tape on a petri dish. The tape is not to tacky and puts off the legs of the spider.
4. Under a field microscope with the twizzers pull the dragline webbing on a small glass drum spinning slowly by an electric motor. Blackwidows will produce dragline for approximately 45 minutes.
5. You must periodically check to make sure the dragline hasn't broke and needs to be repulled and started again.
6. You usually collect webbing from several spiders before cutting the webbing off the drum.

The webbing is difficult to see. The webbing will store indefinitly. It will take several days and many silkings to collect enough to test with the NMR. During the silking the spiders will be force fed the water, nutrient, and most importantly the isotope mixture being tested and isolated as the experimental factor. Blackwidows will live 2-3 years in good conditions. In the stressful lab conditions due to the lack of natural diet, the blackwidow will live 4-6 weeks. The hope is by introducing the isotope to yeast and feeding the yeast to flys (common house fly) and feeding the flys to the spiders, the life spans should increase. This will increase the efficiency and production rates of the webbing.
Time goes fast in the lab!