The fake tarantula is complete.

Fait accompli... I mean, the fake tarantula is complete.

Once again, I'm catching up on my Experiment.com Milestones. This item on my to-do list, unlike the previous one, is actually, 100%, "for realsies" complete now. Although it may not look much like a tarantula at first glance (and, indeed, at first glance may even look a bit obscene), it is designed to approximate a tarantula in the way that matters for this project.

As part of this project, I'll be regularly recording temperature readings of the inside of burrows using an infrared thermometer mounted in the air outside of the burrow. There are so many things about a given tarantula burrow out in the forest that I can't control (e.g., depth, shape, air humidity, etc.). Many of these uncontrollable factors can affect the readings that I get with my infrared thermometer. So, do the readings I get with my infrared thermometer actually reflect the temperature experienced by a tarantula in its burrow?

This is where the fake tarantula comes in. I can fill it with water (which is often used as a stand-in for animal tissue in these sorts of experiments, as we're mostly water) and see if its internal temperature is reflective of the temperature readings given by the infrared thermometer. After some tinkering, I decided to leave legs out of the final design. Lizard research suggests that whether or not a model animal has legs doesn't drastically affect its heating and cooling (Alujevic et al., 2024), and also, the surface area of the legs that would be exposed to the infrared thermometer would be pretty small.

Just 3 days to go until takeoff!

-Nick

 

Just call me Quentin Tarantulino... Wait, a TV show did actually have a character named that. Drat.