Preserving and labelling your spiders

One of Louise Bourgeois' famous spider sculptures (CC image by AlejandroLinaresGarcia)

You will have realised that collecting spiders will involve killing them, and although this is not a nice thing, you should bear in mind that if you get serious about spiders, your records of them in future could help them out in general. I recommend reading Mark Telfer's page where he  discusses this in relation to beetles . You might also like to see the Field Studies Council's code of conduct for collecting invertebrates, and Holly Dillon's blog post about the subject.

The arachnologist him or herself can be identified in the field by the way their pockets rattle with little collecting tubes. I can provide you with a supply. If you want to bring your spiders home alive, then put them in different tubes, or you may find you end up with one, very fat, spider. You'll need to make a note on your tubes exactly where you found the specimen - this can just be a number that refers to the detailed notes in your field notebook.

After examining them live, you might choose to put them in the freezer to despatch them. After this you would add 70% ethanol to the tube to preserve them.

Alternatively, you can take ethanol-filled tubes into the field, and add your spiders straight to them. I can provide you with the ethanol as well.

(Spiders' bodies are much softer than an insect's, so they can't be pinned like you would moths and beetles. So they have to be kept permanently in ethanol. You will add your label inside the tube with the spider (so make sure you write it on good quality paper, with permanent ink).)

Next you can identify your preserved specimens under a dissecting microscope (please do come in and use ours). You really need to keep them immersed in the ethanol, or they'll dry out and shrivel up. Some important characteristics are actually easier to see under liquid like this. Jones-Walters' book has an illustration of a spider being supported by glass beads in a watch glass - useful for propping the specimen in any direction so you can see all the important bits.

The downside of ethanol is that the spider's colours tend to fade. So it's best to try to identify your specimens soon after you collect them - otherwise they may look rather different. It's good to make notes about obvious colours and patterns. It's also good to keep your pickled specimens out of the light to slow down any fading.

Here's a specimen I preserved on my course - on the right you can just see a little spider from the Lycosidae (wolf spider) family. The tube was only small, so I had to write on both sides of my label. Just make sure you include a minimum of 'what, where, when, and who' and you'll be fine.

On this side I have the location and grid reference (and also the vice-county), and a mention of the habitat (I found mine hunting on the bare earth of a mole hill). Then I've got my name as collector, and the date it was collected.

On the other side I've written my identification. I only had to go to family level but if you can identify the species that would be brilliant. (You won't have to put the Order - all your specimens will be Araneae, so it's self-evident). And then there's my name as the determiner (the person who identified the specimen) with the date.

I used a small slip of heavyweight paper (cut from an artist's sketch pad) and an extremely fine-nibbed archive pen (these can be bought in the SU shop, it's a size 0.05).

Remember, you want the most up-to-date version of the spider's name. The best way is to check it at the Natural History Museum's Dictionary of Species. Because you're dealing with an animal, you should really write its Latin name accompanied by the 'authority' (the person who first named it) plus an English name if it has one. For example,
Eresus cinnaberinus (Olivier, 1789)
Ladybird spider 

or if you're hand writing it, underlined:
Eresus cinnaberinus (Olivier, 1789)
Ladybird spider

Then you'll need to find a suitable way of displaying your specimen tubes... perhaps a little box with foam in the bottom and a lid. You might want to label the spots the tubes sit in.. so you can keep some taxonomic order (keep spiders from the same family together for example). Or put them in some kind of rack. You could go for that retro Victorian look, or something super elegant and modern. It's up to you. I might be able to find you some sort of box if you're really stuck.

spider in hand sanitiser gel. CC image by USGS lab

And a new idea: I've recently read about people storing all sorts of invertebrates in vials of hand sanitiser gel. This might be seen as new-fangled compared to the time-honoured ethanol / pinning methods. But as hand sanitiser is partly alcohol, it might indeed preserve them for a while (perhaps for a long while). So you might want to experiment with that - it looks rather aesthetically pleasing as the animals 'hang' in the vial, rather than falling to the bottom. I might have a go and report back.

Update: last year someone had a spider collection in sanitiser and it went mouldy. It was a shame. My advice is to preserve the spiders in alcohol as normal, and then transfer them to the gel at a date nearer the hand-in. I don't think the gel will penetrate the spiders' bodies well enough to preserve them alone, though it might be alcohol-y enough to keep them in once they're preserved. That is my advice.

People have also asked me about using resin, which I've seen done before, but can't vouch for its easyness. I think it will be difficult to be honest, and you could ruin your specimens.

I can provide you with some vials, and certainly with the preservative. You may find you want to buy some of your own supplies - if so, there's a suggestion of some companies here.