One of my many responsibilities as a graduate student is serving as the co-chair of the Wisconsin Ecology graduate committee. "WiscE" ,as some of us have taken to call it, is a group of students and faculty at UW-Madison that get together to promote research and collaboration on a campus where ecologists are spread out in over two dozen departments. The graduate committee is generally tasked with getting the graduate students together and putting on a couple of big productions during the spring semester; the Ecology Job Fair and the Spring Symposium.
Can you say "machinmanship"?
Well one of the fun things I get to do is work on our merchandise. It is something of a long story, but we needed to get at least a dozen things embroidered and some of them, after a bit of discussion, were winter hats. This saga has dragged on, in part because we don't have unlimited funds(!), but this morning I finally took delivery of our new hats! Now, just a few hours later, we only have a few left and I am hopeful that they will all sell quickly so that we can get more hats and shirts in the future.
I love spider-themed t-shirts! Still bitter at Joey Slowik for outbidding me for one of the best ever at AAS in 2007...
It also happened to be my luck while I was picking up the hats that the company who made them, Wildwood Productions, was having a dirt-cheap t-shirt sale to get ride of their old stock and misprints. I was immediately attracted to a bit of spider web poking out from beneath a stack of shirts. After digging a big I was rewarded with a glow-in-the-dark spider shirt, adorned with two species commonly referred to as the "garden spider", Araneus diadematus andArgiope aurantia. Perhaps you recognize these two beautiful spiders yourself, though you might have to wait until next summer to spot them again.
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