On a spider and scope hunt

Second week back after the break! And the things I have learnt!

For example:

  • Immerse specimens entirely in ethanol for photographs otherwise the surface will distort the appearance of structures and make it difficult to identify species.
  • Spiders are not likely to just eat each other’s abdomens. Those left over shells were probably just moults.
  • When you play Game of Thrones the board game you have to resolve all raid orders and then all march orders depending on house order on the influence track rather than all the orders of single house duh.

i.e. lots of stuff I thought and did was wrong.

The fact that we were playing it wrong doesn’t change the fact that I won and that I am fat stag king

If I could describe how the learning process feels at this stage: It’s like finding and eating delicious muffins only to have someone much larger and stronger than you come along and thump you on the back of the head so you spit it all out because they weren’t muffins, they were lies and rocks. Afterwards, you’re glad that someone came along to rectify your mistake (usually your supervisor) but you also have a welt on the back of your head.

But onward!

At this stage, the most important thing for me to do is to see some behaviour happening as, according to the records Cambridgea collections, they do occur for much of the year meaning that collection for the purpose of measurements can be much more flexible. It may be a week or so before I can get back down to Waitomo so at this stage the aim is to collect some males and females from Waitakere and do observations under the house.

I’m also designing spider homes. The most important thing is that the spiders have some sort of scaffolding to build their spiders on, have a dark, narrow retreat which they can stay in during the day and that there’s some way for me to see into that retreat just in case the bastards spiders decide to mate inside the retreats.

The other thing I have to do is locate a microscope which I can use to take better photographs and do measurements of weapons and genitalia. Once I find one I also need to find someone to hold my hand and show me how it all works because I spent an hour and a half trying to save a photograph on the Olympus in the lab. (I didn’t figure it out).

Moral of the story: Any game which lets you announce ‘I’m going to march into Kingslanding with my siege catapult’ is a good game.