A Bad Rep
“Spiders overwhelmingly get bad press,” says Rayor, who claims she has never been bitten in 21 years of researching spiders.
     You’re far more likely to die from a bee sting than a spider bite, because most spiders can’t even penetrate human skin. Only a few are poisonous to humans, and we are always their unintended victims, not their targets.
     And talk about industrious. Many spiders build a new web each day to capture insects, then tear it down at the end of the day, only to start all over again the next day. It is that particular activity that has fascinated Rayor for two decades.
     Most spider species are loners, avoiding contact with other spiders except for mating, after which the female frequently eats her mate. Cannibalism is common in the spider world, and that surely discourages the development of a spider society. Of the 38,000 or so known species of spiders, less than 40 species “show any indication of social behavior at all,” Rayor says.
     That scarcity has taken her repeatedly to Mexico to study colonies of spiders that have surprisingly complex social structures. Unlike most spiders, the Metepeira incrassata live in colonies where individual spiders spin hundreds or even thousands of webs every day.
     The size of the web is crucial, because if it’s too small, there will be no prey captured that day, and the spider will go hungry. How, Rayor wondered, do the spiders work out the rules that allow them to build individual webs without killing each other?
     So Rayor returned to Mexico recently, along with her collaborator, biologist George W. Uetz of the University of Cincinnati, to take a closer look at a rare creature that Uetz has studied for 21 years.
     “We had envisioned that every morning the spiders would wake up and get ready to build their webs, fight for the key positions, and there would be this awful battle,” says Rayor, whose research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Big, Early-Rising Females
But they found something quite different. It turns out that the colony is dominated by big females who know that only the early bird is likely to get the worm. The big spiders stake out their territory early, building their webs by about 6 a.m. It takes about an hour of uninterrupted labor.
     Those who show up a little later are forced to the periphery of the colony where the threat from predators, mainly wasps, is greater, but food is more plentiful. Females with egg sacs show up the earliest of all because they can’t move around, and are usually finished 45 minutes before anyone else.
     Rayor says she learned a valuable lesson while studying the colonial spiders. These creatures apparently have learned that confrontation doesn’t pay. Better to spend their efforts spinning webs some distance from those who have already staked out the territory than to risk being devoured.
     “There was one time when I needed to collect hundreds of spiders and I crawled into the center of a colony and there were spiders literally all over me. At least a couple of hundred. I was feeling very macho about the whole process, and not one of them bit me.
     “I was absolutely covered with spiders, and with silk, and it was really cool,” she adds.
     Even if they had tried to bite her, Rayor wouldn’t have known, because like most spiders, their fangs are not long enough to penetrate human skin.
     And that brings us back to the reason spiders have had such bad press.

The Bad Pack
Some spiders do bite if brought into direct contact with humans. You can tell if it’s a spider bite because spiders use both fangs, so there would be two puncture wounds, not one. If there’s only one, it was some insect, not a spider. Most bites are not venomous, but only irritating.
     There are, of course, exceptions. Some deadly biters include the black widow, found in all four deserts of the Southwest, the brown recluse spider (also known as the violin spider), found in the southwestern and midwestern United States. A relative newcomer in North America is the hobo spider, which hitched a ride from Europe on a ship that docked in Seattle around 1930. Hobo has since spread to several states in the Northwest.
     Some others can cause significant discomfort, like the tarantula, which to many appears ugly enough to be fatal, but isn’t. Tarantulas eat scorpions, by the way, which can be far more harmful.
     Fatalities from spider bites are extremely rare, and treatments are readily available in the geographical areas where the spiders are found.

Good Times, Romance and Spiders
So spiders are not all that dangerous, and they provide valuable service to our environment. They should be loved, not loathed, Rayor says. Of course, she was destined to believe that almost from the beginning.
     As a graduate student at the University of Kansas, she turned up one day with a box full of spiders and showed them to her fellow students of entomology.
     “They were just snooty about it,” she says. “But I didn’t realize then that spiders weren’t insects.”
     Anyhow, she linked up with a “handsome graduate student who was also interested in spiders.” Today, that student is entomologist Cole Gilbert of Cornell. And he’s Rayor’s husband.
     “So spiders are linked with good times, romance, and interesting biology,” Rayor says.
     Ah, shucks, how could anybody ever step on one after hearing that.