A zoo exhibit weaves good PR to our eight-legged fellow travelers

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

We interrupt this tranquil Sunday morning to bring you this important news announcement:

Our Woodland Park Zoo has started a propaganda campaign on behalf of spiders.

With us here today is Erin Sullivan. She's lead keeper of an exhibit called "Masters of the Web," which starts Memorial Day Weekend and runs through Halloween. (Now there's a bad choice of holidays for image changing.)

She's an entomologist, which means she loves insects. So do spiders — but for lunch.

Rod Crawford, curator of arachnids at the Burke Museum, joins us, at least in spirit. Rumor has it Crawford is nocturnal. In fact, he was reached by phone in his lab at midnight, where his research feeds not only projects such as the zoo's but also his own "The Spider Myths Site," ranked by Internet users as among the most cool.

It is unusual for a zoo to create a display on a creature so many people find scary (a fear some say is an evolutionary survival mechanism and a displaced connection between spiders and disease during the plagues of the Middle Ages.) All those people who've said to Sullivan "Ahhhhhhhhh" when she runs the zoo's summer butterfly display now say to her, "Oh, God!"

But spiders are everywhere, with 50,000 classified worldwide so far and another 100,000 to 500,000 still sitting out there nameless, Crawford estimates. They are beautiful. They are grotesque. They spin silk stronger and more flexible than steel, and they serve a huge purpose in life, consuming more than 40 percent of all insects.

"Without spiders, insects would take over the world," says Crawford. That would create boom-and-bust population cycles such as locust plagues and leave little food for people and what the zoo calls "more charismatic vertebrates."

And yet what do we do when we see spiders? We squish. We spray. We call up the zoo or the Burke and scream.

Sullivan hopes "Masters of the Web" will answer many of the questions she hears, and further understanding and appreciation of spiders. Crawford is not quite so idealistic.

"There are hundreds of millions of clueless people out there, and we'll be lucky if we straighten out a few thousand," he says.

What should people do with spiders if not squish them?

"Wave as they go by."

We have nearly 900 spider species in Washington state. But relax. You probably don't have more than 20 kinds sharing your house with you.

Among the 17 spiders exhibited at "Masters of the Web," a "Bob the Builder"-type orb-weaving spider and the remarkable fishing spider will be unencumbered by bars or chains or even glass. They'll live in open-faced display cases with web and pond, staying put because they'll have all they need there, a theory that may not comfort arachnophobes.

How will that go?

"Don't know," Sullivan says. "Hopefully, well."

The zoo's planning committee included someone with arachnophobia — "A real bonus," Sullivan says — and so parts of the display have nothing to do with live spiders but instead focus on intricacies such as how webs work.

The goal is to make visitors aware of the role spiders play in keeping the ecosystem in balance, straighten out many of the untruths surrounding spiders and nip fear before it develops in kids.

Less than 1/20 of 1 percent of all spider species have venom that could cause even a little illness in humans, Crawford explains. The hobo spider and the yellow sac spider are the only two to watch out for in Seattle. Add the Western black widow east of the mountains and on parts of the San Juan Islands and Whidbey.

They might be after your shadow as a place to hide, but they're not after you.

"There is no spider anywhere that would go out of its way to hurt a person," Crawford says. "Would you go out of your way to hurt Godzilla?"

Sherry Stripling: sstripling@seattletimes.com