DNA

Tomorrow is the big day.

As part of an honors project, this semester, I'm going to attempt to sequence some DNA from one of my pet tarantulas. This is the first time I've ever attempted to directly work with genetics. I'm extremely excited, to say the least.

The spider we're using is one of my 1-year-old Psalmopeus irminia spiderlings that I bred myself. We're going to convince it to drop one of it's #3 legs, and we'll use that to attempt to extract the DNA. I should know by tomorrow night if we have successfully extracted any.

In two weeks, we will be using a primer to try and isolate a portion of DNA for sequencing. If we're successful, we're publishing it to an online database of DNA segments. This would be the first segment published for this species.

P. irminia --> B. smithi

I just sold and traded off the last of my excess spiderlings. As part of the deal, I got myself a beautiful sub-adult B. smithi. I decided not to sex this spider and hope to be pleasantly surprised. I have an adult female already. If I get another female, that's always a good thing. If I ended up with a male, I'm ready to try and breed them down the line. I can't lose.

Also, this little bugger is adorable!

Shadow Box

A few years ago, I was doing some volunteer work at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. I did a few different things in my years there: I curated their modern invert collection a little bit, I brought up some of my bugs to show to little kids, and I made a beautiful display that's still being shown.

The display was made from dozens of whole spider molts and a few other critters. It's in a glass cabinet in the Discovery Room, and every time I head to the museum, the dosant working at the time will gush about how popular it is. It feels nice to know that I was able to share this with so many people.

Hello World

I finally decided to start a blog about my many exciting dealings with entomology. Setting this up took longer than I planned, so better content will come later. Until then, I'll leave you a great photo of one of my pet spiders. This is a Chilobrachys fimbriatus.