Science is not for wimps (but regular readers already knew this). There are dangers lurking everywhere, even surrounding the lab. I urge all scientists and wannabes out there to watch this video and take notes.
Shameful. But Brian is a physicist, not an astronomer (though he later redeems himself). I would have grabbed the snakes and spiders, thrown them in the back of the cart, then headed on over to New Orleans to get them made into a po’ boy sandwich with mayo and a side of red beans. Yum!
Brian will be here in Boulder in April for a meeting. I better not tell him about the rattlesnakes and coyotes.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:20 pm
That’s one of the rare things I love about Quebec. No poisonous snakes. No poisonous spiders.
…The spiders still creep me out though and I want them dead.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Coyotes? Who’s worried about coyotes when we’ve got bears and mountain lions wandering into the city?
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Wow, really? Lived in Boulder for a year and the most dangerous thing I ever saw was a crazy homeless man who yelled at me while I was sitting at a stop light….
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I agree with Michelle, here on the West Coast, we have no poisonous snakes. I think we do have brown recluse spiders. I know they have them in Oregon and Washington.
Actually, this guy said everything I would have. Although my comments would have been NSFW. I hate snakes. I hate spiders. I hate bugs. They should all die a very painful death.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:30 pm
O yeah, we do have cougars (the animal) and Grizzly Bears. Thanks for reminding me Ian.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:37 pm
That’s very funny! Looks like a promising Horizon episode (first good one in five years?)
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Well, fortunately we only get black bears here in Boulder. Grizzlies are extinct in Colorado.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Every great American laboratory has lethal animals on their premises. For instance, Fermilab has the great buffalo hazard, and Argonne the massive white deer threat.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Haha! That was pretty funny, I liked how the guy he was with just took it and went with it, gotta watch out for those snakes on the floor! Haha!
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Of course, neither the brown recluse spider nor the black widow (at least the species in north america) will kill you, unless you’re a small child and/or in very bad health. They also don’t drop on you, as they have their webs usually nearer to the ground. The ride on the golf cart is probably the most dangerous thing we see in the video.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
By wimps you don’t mean “weakly interacting massive particles” do you? ;^)
As for the comments about spiders, snakes, and bugs, all I have to say is that you have gotta luv lab people. I once braved a very large black snake (I don’t know what kind) for a very cool trilobite fossil. It was cold and he was about a meter or so away from me. I also did it very quickly! Then there was the rattle snake in South Dakota that startled the person in front of me and she reacted so badly that I thought that we were going to have to carry her out of there because she had gotten bitten. Again though, it was cold and this particular snake was very little. He seemed to be more interested in getting the heck out of there than anything else. Good times! :^)
Oh, and I live in the Chicago suburbs but still have coyotes in my back yard sometimes. A friend had them in suburban San Diego. They are everywhere.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
You’d come to New Orleans? And here I thought that Louisiana was doomed! Did we get a reprieve?
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
You know what? I wouldn’t mind cougars and grizzlies. They’re not bugs (I know spiders aren’t bugs, I don’t care, they look like some and are thus unworthy of life!). And frankly, someone going “That person was mauled to death by a grizzly bear” sounds much cooler than “An icky bitsy annoying spider bit him and he died.”
…The only bugs that deserve to live are ladybugs and fuzzy little cute worms.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
“I don’t like spiders ands snakes….” Ah, what a good old song.
We have coyotes here in Michigan, in fact there are at least two of them that live right near our observatory. It’s fun to see the faces on people when they yip and back. The people’s faces just get this scared, horrific look. So of course, we don’t tell them how harmless they are to bigger living things.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Oh you physics/astronomy babies! Biologists are the macho ones, they’re the ones who LOOK for stuff like that.
But anyway… there is no such thing (to my awareness) as a POISONOUS snake or spider. There are only venomous snakes, and all spiders are venomous.
Poisonous organism- has to be touched or injested. Does not actively inject toxins into other organism, toxins only used as defense.
Venomous organisms- Stings, bites, spears, sprays, or pinches you. Actively inject toxins into other organisms, either as defense or as a way to obtain food.
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I am a wetland scientist in Florida and consistently find myself wading through chest deep water that most assuredly contains water mocassins (poisonous snakes) and alligators.
Yeah, I’m hard core.
January 22nd, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Michelle touches on a pet peeve of mine: I often refer to spiders as “bugs,” and invariably some know-it-all will correct me by saying that spiders aren’t insects. Well, did I use the word “insect?” No, I said “bug,” didn’t I? There’s a difference. One is a three letter word starting with a consonant, while the other is a six letter word starting with a vowel.
Bottom line: Spiders are bugs. Get over it.
January 22nd, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Lugosi- technically, “insects” aren’t even bugs. True bugs are insects belonging to the Hemiptera family. So next time someone tries to correct you on your usage of the word “bug”, you could point out that you are using the term “bug” in the colloquial sense, so you’re not wrong, plus that they don’t actually know what a “bug” is. Then you can explain what a “bug” is and shut them up.
January 22nd, 2008 at 4:41 pm
technically, all bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs, and spiders are certainly not bugs
True bugs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera
January 22nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
PS. err, I meant order not family. Hemiptera is an order.
January 22nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Speaking of pet peeves, Mus spoke up about one of mine, being the difference between poisonous and venomous. Much like a motor and an engine are two different things, people use the words interchangeably and will do so until they are considered synonymous.
As for spiders, I have large wolf spiders in my basement, free roaming, and I love them. They don’t make big webs, are largely harmless to people, and eat any other bugs that may make it into the house. Plus it’s great for scaring the crap out of guests, having three and a half inch spiders scurrying around downstairs.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Mus says: “Lugosi- technically, ‘insects’ aren’t even bugs. True bugs are insects belonging to the Hemiptera family. So next time someone tries to correct you on your usage of the word ‘bug’, you could point out that you are using the term ‘bug’ in the colloquial sense, so you’re not wrong, plus that they don’t actually know what a ‘bug’ is.”
Besides, it’s just a theory.
- Jack
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I can’t say I blame him for being a bit wary of those things. I’m an arachnophobe to a point. Over the last few years, I’ve gotten quite a bit better. As my housemate says, “We live in the country; there are going to be spiders.” I’ve come to recognize the different types we usually have in the place, and so I know they’re no danger. Still, it’s a deeper reaction than that. A lot of times, the fear reaction, whether fight or flight, bypasses the conscious mind, and I react out of instinct. Once I have a chance to assess the creature more closely, which often takes only a fraction of a second for the types I recognize, I can deal with it, even handle the things. A good example of this is when I got a bowl out of the overhead cupboard, and there was a jumping spider in it. As soon as it came into view, I dropped the bowl and jumped back. Before the bowl smashed on the floor, I realized that the spider wasn’t a danger to me, but like I said, my instinct reacted before my mind could. I can’t imagine myself going into any place that I was forewarned would certainly contain black widows and brown recluses. Throw some scorpions into the mix and you’ll be lucky to get me in the same parish.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Also, am I the only one that imagined Brian’s conversation going something along these lines?
BC: It looks to me like there’s a swamp over there… To me it seems like a dangerous place to build an experiment.
Other Guy: Everyone said I was daft to build a gravity wave detector on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, lad, the strongest gravity wave detector in all of North America.
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Impium Orexis, you have wolf spiders in your basement? I don’t think so. Most likely they are funnelweb weavers or hacklemesh weavers.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:01 am
Oh noes!1!!1!!11
I had no idea there were places where concentrations of Black Widows and Brown Recluses co-existed with poisonous snakes. It’s like some kind of conspiracy to freak us out! Are they sure it’s not the entrance to some mad arch-villain’s lair?
I respect other animals right to exist (including poisonous ones), but that said, I would not have gone in there without a flamethrower leading the way.
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 am
Hey, I live in New Orleans, and I’ve seen many brown recluses and black widows (a very beautiful spider) and ‘gators (some road-killed) … I guess I haven’t actually seen any venomous snakes, but I know they’re around here. The spiders won’t kill any healthy people, but their bites do a lot of damage and are very painful (I hear.) The ‘gators I’ve seen have been of the 4′ long or less variety, so they really pose no threat to humans either. Still,
“I would have grabbed the snakes and spiders, thrown them in the back of the cart, then headed on over to New Orleans to get them made into a po’ boy sandwich with mayo and a side of red beans.”
Color me skeptical. ;o) Phil, I’d bet that you’d completely “freak out” if you encountered some of our local fauna. Plus, mayo is part of being “dressed” and red beans aren’t normally a side, they’re a traditional Monday meal with rice. Jambalaya would’ve been funnier. ;o)
Happy Mardi Gras everyone!
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 am
Regarding things dropping on you from above, does this mean they have Dropbears in Louisiana? I was sure they were native to Australia!
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:43 am
One of the things that annoys me the most is when people kill things they don’t like. I used to be horribly arachnophobic, although living alone has helped cure that to a certain extent. I still feel my heart rate rise and my throat go dry whenever I see a big spider running across my carpet, but I can deal with them now.
But I would never kill something just because I don’t like it. Maybe it’s the Buddhist in me trying to get out! I just don’t see that we have the right to do so. Perhaps if the spider (or snake or whatever) was poisonous and actually posed a threat to me, then fine. That is Darwinian Natural Selection in action! It’s him or me, and I choose me!
But here in the UK, there are no poisonous spiders (except the ones that sneak into the UK in a packet of bananas or something, but they don’t usually last long in our climate…). The ones in my house may be ugly, and may cause me to have a completely irrational fear of them, but they ain’t gonna do me any harm, so there’s no reason to kill them.
Darwin put us on a level plane with all the other creatures on the planet - we ain’t better or worse than any of them. In fact, as survival machines, spiders are WAY better than us! They’ve been around a hell of a lot longer than we have, and they’ll probably still be around long after humans have gone extinct.
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:48 am
Sorry Michael, they’re wolf spiders. Funnel web weavers have two rows of four comparably sized eyes while wolf spiders have two distinctively larger eyes. Also, as I said, the ones in my basement don’t make webs, and run down their prey on the ground. I looked up funnel web weaver pictures, and while some do have similar markings, they make very distinctive webs that are absent downstairs. As for the hacklemesh weaver, I was unable to find a picture of one that even remotely resembled my arachnid friends
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:10 am
Impium Orexis, I do know the difference between wolf spiders and funnel weavers. I just never heard of wolf spiders living in houses (except when accidentially strolling in). So which species are your wolf spiders? Do you have a picture?
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:16 am
In general, if you’re a field scientist, beware of places that have the following, because they pose the greatest threat to your health and life:
cars
firearms
cheeseburgers
swimming pools
electricity
ladders
animals:
horses
dogs
bees and wasps
Anopheles mosquitos
Don’t worry about snakes, spiders, alligators or terrorists.
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:39 am
Michael, sorry, I don’t have any pictures. The basement is essentially a huge unfinished garage. When it’s cold outside, it’s cold downstairs, and I never really see any spiders down there when it’s less than 50 degrees F outside. Comparing memory (and a severely dessicated corpse) to pictures I can find online, my best guess at species is Hogna carolinensis. I live in the southeast US.
January 23rd, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Greetings,
A brief nitpick from the antipodes - we do not have black widow spiders in Australia, we have the related redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti) and they haven’t killed anybody in years.
They are most (in)famous for lurking under the seat of outside toilets in the days before access to decent plumbing - it was always a vexed question as to where the tourniqet should go if you were bitten on the buttocks or *ahem* delicate areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-back_spider
http://www.gonewalkabout.com/got/got_spider.htm
January 23rd, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Oh but if you come to visit us down-under…
WATCH THE SKIES!!!
…for the deadly dropbear of course - thanks for the reminder Peter B
January 23rd, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Nine times out of ten, I’d reccomend applying the tourniquet to the neck. If done properly, it has a 100% success rate of stopping the bleeding… forever.
January 23rd, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Haha, this is funny since I did an internship at the other LIGO lab in Hanford, Washington where I remember a few of my fellow students being shocked that I picked up a snake I found (a harmless one; I’m not actually macho at all). I didn’t eat it, though, as I’d already had lunch.
Someone from the Livingston “observatory” told me that he and some others had gone fishing off of one of the beam tubes (there’s supposedly a water-filled ditch alongside it from excavation filled with fish, alligators and various other wildlife).
JPL (another place I’ve interned, but don’t actually work at) has wildlife (mostly deer) running wild all over their campus, and it’s not unheard of that there’ll be a cautionary lab-wide warning that a mountain lion has been spotted on the premises.
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Michael Lonerganon:
“I agree with Michelle, here on the West Coast, we have no poisonous snakes. I think we do have brown recluse spiders. I know they have them in Oregon and Washington.”
There are no populations of brown recluse spiders on the west coast, contrary to popular belief.
They’re everywhere in the South, and they’re famous enough to get blamed for things that happen even in places where they don’t live.
The West coast does have “Hobo” or “Cigar box spiders” which have a necrotic venom too, but it’s not as powerful.
An arachnologist at the University of California, Riverside wrote a nice article expressing frustration at the popularity of the brown recluse as a scapegoat.
One of my sisters was once diagnosed with a brown recluse bite (at least it was in a state they exist in). It was actually a staphylococcus infection (not surprising, those are a hell of a lot more common). It seemed to take one or two more lesions appearing before the doctor decided to give her some antibiotics.
January 24th, 2008 at 2:37 am
@Mena: Don’t forget about the Machos, the massive compact halo objects!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object
January 24th, 2008 at 7:22 am
MandyDax, that’s exactly what I was thinking. That, and really hoping the “guide” would bring up “drop bears”.
January 24th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
On the subject of coyotes in populated area, I once saw one in Cambridge Mass. Actually, only the back half of it was in Cambridge, since it was crossing the road in front of me from Cambridge (on the left
into Belmont on the right. (The John Birch Society headquarters used to be in Belmont. Also Mitt Romney lives here. Oh well, the rest of the residents are fairly rational.) Blanchard Rd between the Tip O’Neil golf course and the farm, if you want to look it up on Google Earth. There are supposedly lots of coyotes in the area, though that’s the only one I’ve ever seen. White tail deer, too, but that was about 2 miles west.