Brown Widow Egg Sac

Jan 14, 2015 • 6:08 PM UTC

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Microorganisms

codygeary

Cody Geary is a Carlsberg Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow working at the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center at Aarhus University, advised by Ebbe Andersen. Cody works on developing RNA nanostructures that fold up from a single strand of RNA. The designs, dubbed 'RNA Origami', are being developed in collaboration with Paul Rothemund at Caltech and Ebbe Andersen at Aarhus University.

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DANGER!! Do not try this at home, brown widow spiders are very venomous, and I was rather surprised by their numbers and speed when I attacked their egg sac.

Here are the brown widow egg sacs that I viewed. I will show two different samples, the spider silk and the egg sac itself. The egg sacs are roughly spherical, and covered with little points. The egg sac and web are quite different in texture, where the egg sacs feel quite like tough paper. Warning, doing this can be very dangerous!!!

The spider web is very fine, and extremely strong. I wrapped it around the glass slide and used parafilm to glue a coverslide to the top. I was surpised by how much microstructure was present.

More brown widow spider web.

Mounting the brown widow egg sac to a slide.

Applying a coverslip to the top of the egg sac. I used Parafilm (a wax-based stretchy tape) to glue the slip to the slide on two edges. You can see little spiders all over the place!!! I hope I didn’t get bitten too many times.

Brown widow egg sac. The egg sac has a much different structure from the normal web, it’s much denser and smoother. Quite amazing!

Brown widow egg sac with slightly-squished spider inside.

Brown widow egg sac.

Brown Widow Egg Sac

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