Tarantulas: Alive and Up Close at the Academy of Natural Sciences

Visit the new Academy of Natural Sciences (ANSP) exhibition and you may get to know tarantulas by other names, too: names like Ramone, Indy, Karen, and Danielle. These monikers, both for the species and the individual spiders, evoke a surprising sort of tenderness for the hairy creatures that have skittered through our horror films for decades.

What’s in a name?

With many other creatures, we’re often content to name them for some characteristic of their appearance, habitat, or behavior: the millipede or starfish, the sandhill crane or mountain gorilla, the howler monkey or puffer fish. But when it comes to tarantulas, we seem overtaken by an especially flamboyant and human-centered impulse. For an animal (and yes, staffers at the media preview insisted, these arachnids are animals) that provokes near-universal horror in laypeople, it’s an interesting contrast. It’s almost as if we’re working our language overtime to subdue our frightened perceptions.

Is it a giant, hairy, fanged, carnivorous spider? Or is it a Martinique Pinktoe? Or a Curly? Or a Rose Hair? Or a Mexican Blond? Or the Hardy Colombian Flame Leg? Even when we bypass these Disney-grade descriptors, we go primate, royal, and even Biblical for the biggest and the baddest: the King Baboon Tarantula and the world-record-holder for size, the Goliath Birdeater (yup, you can see one in the exhibit).

Fewer things seem more alien and frightening than spiders, and for humans, who are gaga for smiley, baby-faced brachycephalic canines like French bulldogs or Boston terriers, you might think spiders would be among the hardest creatures to anthropomorphize, with their many beady eyes and eight appendages and bristling fangs and myriad scrambling joints.

Stylists need not apply

But our names for them refer constantly back to our own bodies and the colors we associate with affection and romance: The spiders are named for their legs, knees, toes, and rumps; they’re rose, pink, red, or purple. And the fancier-looking tarantulas, with patterns on their carapaces and abdomens to rival Oriental rugs, we dub “Ornamental,” as if the spider, evolved to blend in while waiting for its prey in the treetops or in its burrow, will ever know or care that by our definition, it’s gorgeous.

“The unique highlights found on the Chaco Giant Golden Striped are an example of the subtle beauty waiting to be discovered within the world of tarantulas,” one placard reads.

Who needs hairdressers?

The philosophy of spiders

Contemporary philosophers churning out thousands of pages on the problem of anthropocentrism and intrinsic value in environmental ethics (for us mortals, those are the questions of whether we can ever define and describe what matters about nature without viewing its worth through a human lens or human needs) could probably close their laptops and check out this exhibit for a kick of the ultimate in anthropocentric viewing.

The tarantulas are stunning, even crouching in small, peaty terrariums, each with the company of a water bowl, a sheltering bit of bark, and a few unsuspecting crickets. But are they stunning for their own sake? Not in this exhibit. For a creature so far outside our usual predilection for pet piglets, puppies, or parakeets, we work all the harder to humanize it.

The exhibit’s text repeatedly acknowledges tarantulas’ scary reputation and asks us why we should value and protect them. It seems that if we work hard enough, we can relate them to ourselves just as surely as we can a Labrador retriever.

Spider women

“They are the good guys. They are the recyclers. They are the exterminators,” ANSP invertebrate specialist (or “curator of the live bugs,” as she put it) Karen Verderame explained as she cradled a Rose Hair tarantula named Indy in her hands.

And because these arachnids can live for up to 30 years, “They do a good job for a long time.” It’s a quality and duration of career any human could aspire to.

She called Indy “a good educational animal” because her species is hardy, relatively inexpensive to obtain, and amenable to being handled by humans, with the proper desensitization and training to accept our ten insistent, dexterous, nearly-hairless digits. (By the way, most captive tarantulas are female, because they’re less, ahem, “spurty” than the males: They don’t scare us by moving fast, as males are more prone to do. Also, the males have a shorter lifespan, giving us a smaller return on the investment of our resources in housing them.)

Keep your hands to yourself

There are several reasons to value tarantulas, and thus go organic and fair trade, as the show recommends, to preserve tarantula habitats. The spiders not only help keep the world tidy and free of bugs we dub undesirable, but they also make good field trip exhibits and have excellent highlights. And that scary venom? It’s currently under scientific scrutiny for its medicinal properties: It may help us treat our own chronic pain, irregular heartbeats, and even muscular dystrophy. And don’t worry: Even if you did get rude enough for a tarantula to bite you, you’ll be fine. Even the more poisonous ones wouldn’t hurt you much more than a bee sting could.

All in all, Tarantulas: Alive and Up Close seems pretty confident that it’s convinced you of the virtues of the world’s biggest spiders, at least because of their value to yourself. In fact, it’s so sure of our burgeoning affection that it reminds aspiring tarantula pet owners that tarantulas do not enjoy being hugged.

“We’re not going to pet the spider,” one mom admonished her goggling toddler. “I know. Mommy wants to pet it, too.”