Dancing Peacock Spiders Turned an Arachnophobe Into an Arachnologist
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soybull:
Dancing peacock spiders turned an arachnophobe into an arachnologist:
Joseph Schubert spends hours at a time lying in the dirt of theAustralian outback watching for tiny flickers in the sparse, ground-hugging foliage.The 22-year-old arachnologist is searching for flea-sized peacock spiders, andhe admits, he's a little obsessed.
But it wasn't always so. Schubert grew up fearing spiders, with parentswho were "absolutely terrified" of the eight-legged crawlers. "I was taughtthat every single spider in the house was going to kill me, and we shouldsquish it and get rid of it," he says.
Then Schubert stumbled across some photographs of Australia's endemicpeacock spiders, a group named for the adult males' vividcoloring and flamboyantdance moves aimed at wooing a mate (SN: 9/9/16; SN: 12/8/15). And he was hooked.
"They raise their third pair of legs and dance around and show off likethey are the most amazing animals on the planet, which in my eyes they are." Hedecided to pursue a career in arachnology. And despite not quite havingcompleted his undergraduate degree in biology, he's begun working part time at MuseumsVictoria in Melbourne, and has already made a mark.
[...] He still hasn't entirely gotten over his arachnophobia, though he'sgrateful that peacock spiders, while venomous to their tiny insect prey, areharmless to humans. He's handled hundreds of the spiders and suspects theirmouthparts are too small to puncture human skin, even if they wanted to take abite.
Less charismatic spiders are sometimes still a challenge for Schubert'snerves, though. In the Little Desert last year, while putting a 5-centimeter-longwolf spider into a container, the spider pushed the lid aside and crawled up Schubert'sarm. "I screamed," he says, laughing. "But if I can prepare and mentally tellmyself that a spider is not looking to hurt me, and even if it does bite me,it's not going to do anything, then I can put myself in the mental position tohandle it."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.