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The following post is by Chloe Gerak, a Masters student at UBC who completed an undergraduate project at Simon Fraser University in the Gries lab.This past weekend, she won the top prize for an undergraduate talk at the Annual General  Meeting of the Entomological Society of British Columbia with a talk entitled « How the false widow finds true love ». Photos by Sean McCann.

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A male Steatoda grossa. These spiders have stereotyped courtship behaviour involving stridulation of an organ located dorsally between the cephalothorax and abdomen.

For approximately eight months, I studied the courtship behaviour and chemical communication between male and female false widow spiders, Steatoda grossa. Prior to studying them in Prof. Gerhard Gries’ lab at Simon Fraser University, I had never even heard of this species!

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Female Steatoda grossa on her web.

My mentor Catherine Scott and I had collected juvenile and mature false widow spiders around the basement of the biology wing at SFU… and let’s just say we didn’t have a lack of specimens to collect. Almost every baseboard we turned over or corner we searched, we would find these little guys and collect them individually into petri dishes. These formed the nucleus of our laboratory colony which we reared for behavioural experiments.

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A  common nickname for Steatoda grossa is the “cupboard spider,” which I find extremely appropriate considering these spiders seem to love dwelling in dark corners. Since they are so abundant around SFU, and I had never even seen one before this, I think people should not be frightened by cohabiting with them… likely, you won’t even know they are there!

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As mentioned in a previous post, the Entomological Society of BC has been working hard to improve the Society’s impact by enhancing our online presence to reach more people in BC, as well as the rest of Canada and the world. We’ve undertaken a massive project to digitize our entire journal archive, and are in the process of moving all 108 volumes of the Journal of the ESBC online (plus occasional papers, supplementary reports, and the Quarterly Bulletins dating back to 1906!).

This project will provide unprecedented public access to the Society’s publications, and you can help! With scanning and OCR completed, we need to extract the metadata for each article, including the abstracts and references, so that we can import them into our new online journal system (link to http://journal.entsocbc.ca). We are recruiting volunteers to assist with this step, as well as creating cover images from the scanned volumes.

  • Flexible and easy;
  • Can be done from anywhere (you don’t have to live in BC!);
  • Opportunity to explore the history of entomology in BC;
  • Work closely with ESBC journal and web editors;
  • Contribute directly to the establishment of a permanent, online, open-access repository of entomological knowledge in BC;
  • Ideal for students or anyone with an interest in entomology and community service.

Contact Alex Chubaty (webmaster@entsocbc.ca) if you are interested in contributing time towards this project.