a reporter at large spider woman

Hunting venomous species in the basements of Los Angeles. by burkhard Bilger

arly one morning last year, when the of the brown recluse, but larger and lady! Spider lady! Come to the front!” streets of downtown Los Angeles more venomous. Sometime in the late Torres was standing by the cash register, wereE still mostly deserted, a strange figure nineteen-sixties, apparently, their ances- her hands on her hips. She made Binford appeared in the Goodwill store at 235 tors had ridden to California in costume scrawl out a waiver on a legal pad, then led South Broadway, next door to the Gua- crates owned by a troupe of Shakespear- her down a long, dingy hallway to the dalupe Wedding Chapel. She had on ten- ean actors from Brazil. A year or two basement door. “It’s your own risk,” she nis shoes, dungarees, and a faded blue later, they were discovered at a theatre said, pointing down the stairwell. “If I T-shirt, and was outfitted as if for a safari in the L.A. suburb of Sierra Madre don’t hear from you in two days, I call the or a spelunking expedition. A khaki vest and promptly triggered a citywide panic. authorities.” was stuffed with empty plastic vials; a “50 Deadly Spiders Found,” a front- black duffelbag across her shoulders held page headline in the Los Angeles Times piders have a bad reputation, largely a pair of high-tech headlamps, a digital announced on June 7, 1969. “Venom undeserved. The great majority aren’t camera, and a venom extractor. She made Like Rattlesnake’s.” In Sierra Madre, venomousS enough to harm us, or their her way to the front desk, past a rack of spider suspects were rushed to the police fangs are too small, or their jaw muscles summer dresses on sale for six dollars and in jam jars, ice-cream boxes, and Styro- are too puny, or they simply see no profit ninety-nine cents. Then she introduced foam cups. “Some have shown up around in attacking large, indigestible creatures herself to the store manager, Gina Torres, 3 a.m. in the trembling hands of frantic that can crush them with their toes. Un- a statuesque woman with silver-blond householders,” the Times reported. By like snake venom, which is designed to hair and thickly drawn eyeliner. She said August of that year, more than two hun- kill vertebrates, spider venom is almost that her name was Greta Binford and she dred laeta—as well as a thousand of always meant for insects. Its toxins can wanted to hunt spiders in the basement. their molted skins—had been found stop a hornet in mid-flight, but they lack Torres stared at her. Binford is small across Los Angeles. One family of eight proper targets in the human nervous sys- and keen-eyed, with a dark-brown bob abandoned their home at the sight of a tem. “If we were wired for spider venoms and a scattering of freckles across her single spider. the way insects are, we would be screwed,” nose. Her voice has a quick, clear, almost The Great Spider Hunt of 1969 ended Binford says. chirping quality, and at forty-one she as such scares usually do: attics were Still, some spiders can kill you, and carries herself with the springy assur- cleared, toolsheds swept clean, buildings they’re the ones that interest Binford. She ance of a high-school cheerleader. She fumigated and declared safe. Yet the spi- has spent the past ten years collecting ven- didn’t look like a crackpot to Torres. ders remained. Buildings like the Good- omous species worldwide, raising them in Then again, she didn’t look like a spider will store had basements and sub-base- her lab, and patiently milking their fangs. hunter, either. Perhaps she was a health ments so deep and interconnected that no A single spider can inject its victims with inspector. “I’ve never heard anything pesticide could reach into every hiding as many as two hundred compounds: pro- about you,” Torres said, her eyes narrow- place. “I showed one of the spiders to an teases that dissolve flesh, gelatinases that ing. “I’ve been here two years, and I’ve employee the last time I was here,” Bin- dissolve connective tissues, neurotoxins never seen you before.” ford told me. “And she said, ‘Yeah, I see that short-circuit nerves, slow the heart, Binford explained to Torres that she those in the bathroom all the time.’ ” No and freeze the limbs. A spider’s venom was a professor of biology at Lewis & bites had been reported, but word seemed offers a window onto its evolution, Bin- Clark College, in Portland, Oregon. She to have got out that something was not ford says—a chemical record of its most specialized in arachnology and was on a quite right in the basement. Torres told successful experiments at killing prey. It’s weeklong spider-hunting trip through the Binford that no one was allowed down- also a storehouse of potential pharmaceu- Southwest. She’d been to this store be- stairs, for reasons of liability. “You have to ticals, one that remains virtually untapped. fore, years ago, to collect an interesting understand,” she said. “I have to protect “There aren’t any spiders for which we species that lived in the basement. “I just myself.” know all the chemicals in their venom,” need an hour or so to get a few more spec- Binford spent the next hour on her cell she says. “None.” imens,” Binford said. What she didn’t say phone, pleading her case with Goodwill In the United States, two groups of was that they were among the deadliest executives. She was thumbing through a spiders are widely considered dangerous: spiders in the world. rack of used Hawaiian shirts, awaiting the black widows and brown recluses, along They belonged to a South American management’s verdict, when an irritated with their close relatives. Widows are species called Loxosceles laeta—a cousin voice blared over the intercom, “Spider small creatures, potbellied and delicately BANYAI ISTVAN

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TNY—2007_03_05—PAGE 66—133SC. Greta Binford didn’t tell the store manager that the spiders downstairs were among the deadliest in the world.

TNY—2007_03_05—PAGE 67—133SC.—live art R15983_RD—please pull kodak approval proof for press color guidance articulated, often with a red or yellow hard to distinguish from herpes, cellulitis, gans—bulbous or bifurcated, barbed or hourglass on the abdomen. They can be flesh-eating staph, and half a dozen other smooth—is sometimes the only clue to found in cellars, garages, and woodpiles severe infections. (In 2001, two cases of its species.) Then she went to find Louis in every state, and seem to be fond of anthrax poisoning in New York were Sorkin, the assistant to the curator of spi- filth. (They’re notorious for biting the initially blamed on recluses.) Perhaps to ders. Sorkin is usually called in to inves- pendulous parts of outhouse visitors.) keep the toxins from spreading, the body tigate the city’s infestations, and Binford The recluse and other Loxosceles species walls off the arteries and veins around the suspected that the museum might have prefer warm, dry country. They’re com- bite. The skin, starved of blood, begins to a few trespassers of its own. Spiders often mon in the Southwest and the Midwest die, turning black and sloughing off, leav- crawl into crates and cabinets and get sent but can range as far east as Georgia. In ing an open wound that can take months around the world with travelling exhib- Oklahoma, where I grew up, my mother to heal. Bite victims sometimes look as if its, she said. Over the years, she had found sometimes found them in our bedsheets— they’ve had serious burns. Some go into Loxosceles in the basements of the Argen- their legs long and nearly translucent, shock. A rare few suffer hemolysis: their tine Museum of Natural Sciences and their bodies a pale umber, with a violin- red blood cells begin to burst, poisoning the Indiana Statehouse. shaped mark on the head. We called them the kidneys and slowly depriving the Sorkin, a short bald man with bushy fiddlebacks. body of oxygen. Although an antivenom eyebrows and a rolling, stumpy gait, I was never bitten by a fiddleback, but for recluse bites has recently been devel- handed us a pair of flashlights and took a friend of mine named Jeanne Devlin oped, with Binford’s help, it has yet to be us down a service staircase. As we walked, swallowed a black widow one spring, approved in the United States. he told us about the bedbug colony that when it crawled into her juice glass on a he was raising in his office, mostly on his Girl Scout trip. It felt like a cocklebur in first met Binford at the American own blood—“I like to put them on me her throat, she told me recently, and bit Museum of Natural History, in New and watch them feed”—and about a din- her at least once before she coughed it IYork. She was planning her trip through ner hosted by the local Explorers Club. up. Black-widow venom is a cocktail of the Southwest to gather fresh venom for The menu included tempura-battered neurotoxins. It targets the muscles and her research, and she wanted to spend tarantulas, he said, but the cooks had ne- nerves, causing cramps and spasms, fever, time in the museum first, studying the glected to clean them properly. The spi- nausea, and wracking pains. One or two species that she hoped to find in the ders’ barbed hairs got stuck in some din- people may die from it every few years, field. ers’ throats, and they had to be taken to most of them elderly or very young, but The spiders were kept in slender vials the emergency room. an antivenom has been available since the of ethyl alcohol, and arranged in cabinets We spent the next hour or so crawling nineteen-thirties. Devlin’s mother drove in a vast, deserted hall. Each vial held one around in the sub-basement, shining our her to a local doctor for the injection. or more specimens and was marked with beams among the steam pipes and ele- The other girls were crying hysterically, a typewritten label. One of the spiders, a vator crankshafts. Sorkin spotted a few convinced that she was going to die, but Loxosceles rufescens native to the Mediter- cockroaches and recalled a museum scien- she went home that night with nothing ranean, had been found in New York in tist who used to capture and tag them, more than a terrible sore throat. 1992. “116 W. 71st, Apt #3,” the label then track their movements around the No one knows how many people in read. “Cynthia Dansby. Put on sweat- building. But the most exotic spider we the United States are killed by Loxosceles pants. Bit on thigh.” found was a European house spider, Tege- bites—estimates vary from fewer than Binford peered at the specimens naria domestica. We’d have better luck at one a year to as many as ten. The venom through a microscope, focussing on their the Goodwill store in Los Angeles, Bin- triggers an immune reaction that can be genitals. (The shape of a spider’s sex or- ford assured me. “You’ll see,” she said. “It’s just like getting candy in a candy store.”

piders tend to be solitary hunters, and they demand the same single- mindednessS from scientists. The French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre set the pattern in the late eighteen-hundreds, when he retired to Provence after a ca- reer in chemistry and physics, and spent the rest of his life studying the bugs in his garden. “When we lack the society of our fellow-men,” he wrote, “we take refuge in that of animals, without always losing by the change.” Fabre delighted in what he called “ex- perimental villainies.” He might catch a “Nice, but we’ll need an environmental-impact study, a warranty, recall bumblebee in a bottle and send it buzz- bulletins, recycling facilities, and twenty-four-hour customer support.” ing down a tarantula’s den, or steal a fe-

TNY—2007_03_05—PAGE 68—133SC.—live art a11987 male spider’s egg sac and replace it with death: all these do not count, in others; Binford’s job was to sit and watch. a ball of cork. (She couldn’t tell the dif- the main point is that the morsel be ten- Every morning, she’d carry a camp stool ference, he found.) He once took two der and savory.” to the edge of a web and spend the next tarantulas, each with a brood of spider- three hours taking notes. “It was still, still, lings on her back, and put them in the inford came late to the study of still,” Binford recalls. A troop of monkeys same cage to test their territoriality. “One spiders, and without morbid pre- might wander by, or an anteater snuffling morning, I catch the two harridans fght- dilections.B She grew up on a small corn- for food. There were sloths in the trees, ing out their quarrel on the floor,” he and-soybean farm in west-central In- their fur overgrown with emerald moss, later wrote: diana—“dull spider country,” she calls and jaguar tracks in the underbrush. Yet The stronger of the two, the one on top, it. Her parents had met at a family re- the spiders held her attention. Less than closes her lethal engine and grinds the head of the prostrate foe. Then she calmly devours the union, and had local roots so deep and half a centimetre long, they worked to- deceased by small mouthfuls. intertwined that Binford jokingly uses gether like bands of Lilliputians, wrap- Now what do the youngsters do, while herself as an example of inbreeding ping up locusts many times their size, their mother is being eaten? Easily consoled, heedless of the atrocious scene, they climb on when she teaches evolutionary biology patching the web, and caring for one an- the conqueror’s back and quietly take their classes. At her parents’ house, though, other’s children. “Most of what I’d heard places among the lawful family. The ogress evolution was never discussed. The Bin­ about spiders was nasty, evil stuff, and all raises no objection, accepts them as her own. She makes a meal of the mother and adopts fords were creationists, and Greta was I saw was really beautiful,” Binford says. the orphans. born again in high school. At the end of the summer, when Binford As an undergraduate at Purdue, Bin- handed in her notes, Rypstra told her Fabre’s successors often shared his ford studied veterinary medicine, then that she was now the world’s expert on ghoulish enthusiasms, if not always his switched to psychology after she nearly that species. scientific rigor. John Crompton was a fainted while watching a dog get an in- “The night I got home, I was just bub- former mounted policeman in colonial jection. During her sophomore year, she bling over,” Binford says. “I told my hus- Africa; W. S. Bristowe was an executive joined a small, charismatic church called band that I wanted to change my major, in the British chemical industry. Their Calvary Chapel and soon fell in love that this stuff was wonderful.” But her books, published in the nineteen-forties with one of its members. When he grad- husband seemed distracted. Later that and fifties, are full of entomological de- uated and took a job near Cincinnati, night, he confessed that he’d fallen in love tail but sometimes read like the diaries of she spent a summer commuting there on with another woman. “I kind of got used ten-year-old boys. Bristowe once ate a weekends—rolling her hair into the car to you being gone,” he said. spider on a bus to shock his fellow-pas- window so that it would yank her awake When Binford told me this story, at a sengers. He was fascinated by the grim if she fell asleep. By that fall, they were café across from the Museum of Natural mechanics of spider sex and held gladia- married. History, she didn’t try to blame the disas- torial combats between species. (His un- Binford played the role of a “Christian ter on destiny or Providence—she had disputed champion was a small but feisty conservative housewife” for a couple of lost her religious faith in the years follow- female ground spider, Drassodes lapidosus, years—“I did a lot of cross-stitching. I ing that summer. “My whole platform which killed fifteen larger opponents in did a lot of crafts.” But she grew restless. crumbled,” she said. “Until that moment, two days.) Crompton licked webs to see In 1987, she enrolled at a branch of I’d been on a track of what’s expected of a how they tasted and daydreamed about Miami University, hoping to become a woman in rural Indiana, and it just shat- which species he would like to be. He en- high-school science teacher. “She didn’t tered those expectations.” Then she vied the crab spider, “whose life consists have her sights set very high,” Ann Ryp- smiled. “It was really the best thing that of immobility interspersed with succulent stra, her genetics professor at the time, could have happened to me,” she said. meals,” but settled on a male labyrinth told me. “But some students are capable spider, whose mate treats it kindly after of great things if you nudge them a little, arly in her career, when she was in copulation. For most species, Crompton and Greta was nudgeable.” One day after graduate school at the University noted, a husband’s place is “in the diges- class, Rypstra made Binford an offer. She Eof Utah, Binford tried focussing on the tive tract of his wife.” had a grant to study spiders in the Ama- milder side of entomology. She had be- Time spent in the company of spiders zon basin of Peru, she said, and wanted come fascinated with evolution after leav- can cure anyone of his sentimentality Binford to join her as an assistant that ing the Church, and wanted to under- about nature. In these books, the coöper- summer. Binford dismissed the idea at stand what gave rise to the biodiversity ative ant and the hardworking bee give first, but her husband encouraged her she’d seen in the rain forest. Spider evolu- way to much darker figures: mothers to apply. tion, though, has mostly murderous ends. who eat their children, neighbors who The spiders were of a rare, social kind. The forty thousand species identified so prey on neighbors, predators who keep They gathered in the rain forest by the far make their homes from the slopes of their victims bound and sedated, then hundreds of thousands and constructed Mt. Everest to the islands off Antarctica, slowly drain their body fluids. “Under communal webs, some of which were the and nearly everything they do is in quest the tyranny of the stomach, we are all of length of a tractor-trailer. By describing of fresh meat. Just as birds can be identified us, beasts and men alike, ogres,” Fabre how the spiders lived and worked to- by their singing, so spiders can be sorted wrote. “The dignity of labor, the joy of gether, Rypstra hoped to uncover the by their methods of killing. life, maternal affection, the terrors of roots of all social behavior. Spiders begin their hunting with a few

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TNY—2007_03_05—PAGE 69—133SC. handicaps. They’re often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some spe- PHONE BOOTH cies extend their legs by hydraulic pres- sure, using the same liquid that carries There should be more nouns oxygen from their lungs, so they have a For objects put to sleep hard time running and breathing at the Against their will same time. Even their poison may be no The “booth” for instance match for their victim’s: a crab spider’s With coiled hidden wires bite is to a honeybee’s sting as “an air-gun Lidded chrome drawers compared with an elephant rifle,” John Tipping up like lizards’ eyes Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an We looked out into rhymed rain astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher We heard varying vowels estimates that there are some five trillion Rimbaud’s vowels with colors spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of Orange or blue beeps which consumes about a tenth of a gram Types of ancient punctuation of meat a day. Were their victims people The interpunct between words instead of insects, they would need only A call became twenty-fve cents three days to eat all sixteen and a half mil- Times in a marriage we went there lion Dutchmen. To complain or firt To compensate for their weaknesses, A few decades and we wised up spiders have evolved an array of weapons, Got used to the shadow tactics, and freakish mutations that bring The phone booth as reliquary to mind a tiny band of supervillains: the An arm could rest X-Men of the animal world. Jumping spi- On the triangular shelf ders can leap up to ffty times their own A briefcase between the feet body length; spitting spiders shoot streams A pen poked into acoustic holes of glue to ensnare their prey; orb weavers While we gathered our actions/wits can spin a silk as strong as steel and a For magic and pain thousand times as elastic. (In 1710, a The destiny twins Frenchman named Bon raised enough Some of us scratched pale glyphs spiders to make mittens from their silk; he Onto the glass door while talking had to give up the enterprise, though, when all of his workers ate one another.) Some spiders are shape-shifters, camou- bubbles that it collects on the surface. The Taranto, on the southern coast, this was a faging themselves as dead leaves or bird bubbles coalesce into an airy chamber large, fearsome-looking wolf spider—no droppings; others change colors to match where the spider can sit, safe from preda- relation to American tarantulas—whose the flowers where they’re hiding. A spider tors. When hunger strikes, the water spi- bite was said to cause madness, melan- discovered in the nineteen-eighties, ten- der waits for a shrimp or a tadpole to swim choly, and death. A victim’s only hope tatively named Theridiosoma schwarze­ by, then it pounces. was to dance furiously for days on end, neggeri, uses its brawny forelegs to stretch often accompanied by fiddles and pipes, its web as taut as a slingshot. When an in- enom is a spider’s oldest weapon, until his body gave out and the venom sect happens by, the spider lets go, and the and its most mysterious. Like silk, it wore off. Liszt, Chopin, and Mendels- web snaps forward to capture the victim. canV be found in almost every species and sohn later wrote music for stylized ver- “The thing moves, therefore it is worth was probably present in their earliest an- sions of these dances, which came to be catching,” Fabre wrote. “This formula cestors: the first spiders already had fangs. known as tarantellas. seems to sum up the spider’s wisdom.” Yet Until recently, though, it was impossible “Must we take these queer things seri- the instincts of some species are so elabo- to say how venoms differed. Pure sam- ously or laugh at them?” Fabre wondered. rately programmed that they can almost ples were hard to obtain; chemists didn’t The answer could be gleaned only from pass for intellect. The portia spider hunts know how to isolate their components, a living subject. So Fabre took a black- other spiders by sneaking onto a high and medical reports were contradictory. bellied tarantula—a cousin of the Italian branch and dangling down on them, or “Thus we read of a man bitten by a spi- kind—and had it bite the leg of a young pretending to be an insect caught in the der without any effect,” Crompton wrote, sparrow. Then he took notes: web. The bolas spider emits moth phero- “whilst his sister bitten by the same spi- A drop of blood flows; the wounded spot is mones to lure its prey, then whips a line der had a painful swelling that lasted sev- surrounded by a reddish circle, changing to purple. The bird almost immediately loses the of silk around like a lasso to snag it. The eral hours.” use of its leg, which drags, with the toes dou- most impressive, though, may be the The most notorious spider in Europe bled in; it hops upon the other. Apart from this, water spider. It builds a web beneath the in Fabre’s time was the Italian tarantula, the patient does not seem to trouble much waves, anchored to a plant, and fills it with Lycosa tarantula. Named for the town of about his hurt; his appetite is good. My daugh-

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TNY—2007_03_05—PAGE 70—133SC. acacia ants (“1.8. Someone has fired a sta- ple into your cheek”) to bullet ants (“4.0+. One day we started to race past Like walking over flaming charcoal with And others started racing a three-inch nail in your heel”). Spiders, Holding phones to their ears though, are less willing collaborators. Holding a personal string “One can ill-treat and tease them for To their lips hours on end,” Crompton grumbled. If there are overages “But the peevish creatures will not bite.” There might be nouns for Some researchers have removed venom The clotting of numbers in the sky glands and injected themselves with the So thick the stars can’t shine through contents; others have swallowed venom- A word for backing away filled sugar pills. A few, like the Smith- From those who shout to their strings sonian’s curator of arachnids, Jonathan In the airport while eating Coddington, have managed to provoke We loved the half-booths spiders to bite them, but the results have Could cup one hand on the mouthpiece almost always been anticlimactic. “It feels Lean two-thirds out to talk to a friend like picking up a pin, dipping it in vine- Sitting in the lobby gar, and then whirling it around in an The universe grows open cut,” Coddington told me. “It’s no We are dizzy as mercury big deal.” The Italian tarantula is no ex- We are solitudes aided by awe ception: its venom leaves a touch of swell- Let us mourn secrets told to ing which fades within a day or two. No Fake wood and the trapezoidal seat frenzied dancing required. Perfume in the mouthpiece By the beginning of the last century, Like a little Grecian sash most arachnologists agreed that there Why did we live so fast were no truly dangerous spiders in the The booth hid our ankles United States. Then, in 1922, William We twisted the rigid cord Baerg, an entomologist at the University As we spoke of Arkansas, coaxed a black widow to It made a kind of whorl bite him on the finger. Baerg let the spi- der sink its fangs in for a full five seconds, —Brenda Hillman then kept a diary of his reactions: July 10, 8:25 AM: When spider is removed, the pain keeps on growing, a sharp piercing ters feed him on fies, breadcrumbs, apricot And yet, in hindsight, Fabre didn’t go sensation. pulp. He is sure to get well, he will recover his 12:20 PM: Pain in hips rather severe. strength; the poor victim of the curiosity of far enough. Just because a spider’s bite can Chest feels cramped, breathing and speech science will be restored to liberty. . . . Twelve harm a mole doesn’t mean that it will are spasmodic. hours later, the hope of a cure increases; the harm a human. Recluse venom can kill 4:30: Nervous tremor, present since noon, invalid takes nourishment readily; he clamors is more noticeable now. for it, if we keep him waiting. But the leg still rabbits, for instance, but it has no effect 5:15: Arrived at the hospital. drags. I set this down to a temporary paralysis on rats. To truly settle the toxicity debate, July 11, 6:00 AM: Pain in legs and hips very which will soon disappear. Two days after, he researchers needed human subjects. And severe. refuses his food. Wrapping himself in his sto- July 12, 5:50 AM: Slept for short periods, icism and his rumpled feathers, the sparrow who better than themselves? much troubled with delirium. As soon as I fell hunches into a ball, now motionless, now Entomologists are somewhat accus- asleep, I would be frantically and in an utterly twitching. My girls take him in the hollow of aimless fashion working with spiders. their hands and warm him with their breath. tomed to being research subjects. Justin The spasms become more frequent. A gasp Schmidt, a scientist in Tucson, has been proclaims that all is over. The bird is dead. attacked by more than seventy-five spe- Altogether, Baerg spent three days in cies of ants and bees, and has put together the hospital, and needed a week to re- The night of the sparrow’s death, an index to rank the pain. It runs from cover fully. As proof of the spider’s tox- there was “a certain coolness” among his sweat bees (“1.0. A tiny spark has singed icity, he later wrote in The Journal of Par- family at the dinner table, Fabre noted, a single hair on your arm”) to bullhorn asitology, the results were “all that could and an “unspoken accusation of cruelty” be desired.” in their faces. Nevertheless, he added, “I had the courage to start afresh, this time aerg’s experiment was much on my on a mole.” Thirty-six hours later, it, too, mind that morning at the Goodwill lay dead. “It appears to me that the bite store.B The Loxosceles laeta in the base- of this spider is not an accident which ment weren’t recognized as dangerous man can afford to treat lightly,” Fabre until 1937, and recluses were considered concluded. “This is all that I have to say harmless until the late nineteen-fifties. to the doctors.” These days, though, pictures of horrific

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TNY—2007_03_05—PAGE 71—133SC.—live spot art r15971_E please inspect and report on quality Loxosceles bites are easy to find: ulcerating ghost’s. When I found her again, she was sitive to Loxosceles toxins. Five years ago in ankles; forearms stripped of flesh; pale, corralling a female laeta into a vial, along Lenexa, Kansas, a family of four trapped ragged wounds ringed with blackened with its cottony egg sac. The spider and killed more than two thousand re- cells. Binford had never been bitten by a looked twice as large as the recluses I re- cluses in their nineteenth-century farm- Loxosceles, but she didn’t take any chances: membered, but with the same sandy col- house. Yet no one in the family suffered she wore gloves when collecting and oring. “It’s just too easy,” Binford said, from a bite. watched where she put her hands. “This snapping the lid shut. Venom experts get uneasy when asked is where we most need headlamps,” she Back at her lab, Binford could tease about the risk of Loxosceles bites. The sta- said, strapping hers on. Then she scur- apart the spiders’ toxins, using a host of tistics are suspect, they say. “We have sev- ried downstairs, looking for a second as if chemical techniques developed in the eral thousand bites a year coded in our da- she had multiple eyes. past few decades, then sequence the tabase,” Leslie Boyer, the medical director The key to good hunting, Binford genes for the most harmful compounds. of the Arizona Poison Center, in Tuc- said, was to have a “search image” in By comparing sequences among species, son—perhaps the spider-bite capital of mind. Wolf spiders, for instance, can be she could piece together a Loxosceles the United States—told me. “I don’t found by their eye shine. When you train family tree and so lay the groundwork know which is the bigger number: those a flashlight beam over your back yard at for future treatments. “If you’re camp- that are coded as bites but aren’t, or those night and see a faint glimmering in the ing in Peru and you’re bitten by some- that aren’t but are.” grass, those might be spiders gazing back thing and you have a little antivenom in In Los Angeles, officially speaking, at you. Loxosceles tend to splay their legs your pocket, will it work?” she said. “It’s there have been no Loxosceles laeta bites in like asterisks, and to gather in pockets of fundamentally an evolutionary ques- fifty years. But when I talked to Sean dampness—anything from the bottoms tion.” She crouched down and plucked Bush, a professor of emergency medicine of rotting logs to the spaces behind steam another pregnant female from its web. at Loma Linda University Medical Cen- pipes. “It reminds me of hunting for mo- “It’s surprising to me how few of us ter (one of the area’s leading venom cen- rels as a kid,” Binford said. “There’s a kind study spider venom,” she said. “It’s just ters), he told me that people come in of Zen moment where everything falls so cool.” complaining of spider bites almost every away and there’s just you and the spider.” Half an hour later, Binford had thirty day. Many have necrotic lesions, and the The stairs led down to a long, open live spiders in her vest. She had won- number of lesions has been rising. “They space, with pipes and wires hung low dered, earlier that morning, if the Good- really do look like spider bites,” Bush said, from the ceiling. Bits of graffiti flared into will store’s Loxosceles might be gone—if but he thought that most were probably view, as our headlamps swung past, and the city exterminators had finally done caused by antibiotic-resistant staph. The strands of webbing caught at our faces. their jobs. Now she worried that the danger of Loxosceles bites is “grossly over- Most of it belonged to pholcids, or daddy spider population might be a little too rated,” he said. In any case, he added, as longlegs, Binford assured me. Their healthy. She pointed to a patch of rub- long as no antivenom is available, the di- venom is strong enough to kill a mouse, ble with a glimmer of daylight coming agnosis is moot. “What we do is treat the and they prey on other spiders, but their through it—we could hear the low rum- wounds.” fangs are too small to hurt us. She played bling of trucks outside—then to cracks For the past four years, a Mexican her beam along the bottom of a wall and and gaps in the other walls. “All these company called Bioclon has been work- held it on a Steatoda, a bulbous relative of buildings are connected,” she said. “And, ing on an antivenom based partly on Bin- the black widow, famous among arach- meanwhile, there are piles of clothes ford’s research. Of the eighty-odd Loxos- nologists for turning radioactive and being sorted upstairs that go out all celes species in the Americas, all those biting Peter Parker in the re- over the city. This could be which have been tested cause lesions with cent Spider-Man film. Then the beachhead of Loxos- a single type of toxin, called sphingomye­ she stopped and scanned celes laeta in Los Angeles.” linase D. The toxin varies slightly from the room from end to end. species to species, Binford has found, but “It’s like an Easter-egg hunt,” hen Binford milks the same few antibodies ought to be able she said. The spiders were laeta in her lab, their to neutralize any bite. To produce them, hiding in plain view. fangsW yield about ten times Bioclon has cloned four versions of the There, on the wall: two as much venom as other toxin, immunized horses with them, then Loxosceles laeta scuttling out Loxosceles’, and medical re- harvested the antibodies from the horses’ of the light. And there, on the staircase: cords suggest that their bites leave larger blood. Last fall, the company began test- a fat female surrounded by four of her lesions. Yet, even if the Goodwill’s popu- ing its antivenom in a hospital in Mexico moltings. And there, beside an empty lation spread across Los Angeles, it isn’t City. In most cases, Jorge Paniagua-Solís, whiskey bottle: an adolescent male in its clear how much of a threat these spiders Bioclon’s research director, told me, the web. Suddenly, spiders seemed to be ev- would pose. Laeta are easily as reclusive as pain fades immediately and the lesions erywhere—crawling on walls and cling- their North American cousins. They keep begin to heal within a day. ing to the ceiling, suspended from pipes to dark, quiet areas and shrink from Even so, the antivenom may not be and crouched behind beams. I lost Bin- human contact. When they do bite, the approved in the United States for several ford at one point and called out her name venom doesn’t always have an effect: years: the demand is too low, and the cost in the dark, my voice as warbly as a some people’s immune systems aren’t sen- of clinical trials too high. In the mean-

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TNY—2007_03_05—PAGE 72—133SC.—live spot art r15971_f please inspect and report on quality time, the best remedy for an infestation is still an exterminator. Spiders have many fine qualities, not the least of which is an ability to hold their venom in abey- ance. Their bites are almost never meant for us, but it’s best not to tempt them. “If you ask me,” the Smithsonian’s Jonathan Coddington said, “I’d nuke that Good- will building.”

ate one night, toward the end of our trip, Binford and I pulled into Yar- nell,L Arizona, a former mining town in the high country northwest of Phoenix. Binford had a friend and mentor there named Chuck Kristensen, who had taught her how to milk venom years ago. He lived in a pink stucco house near the center of town, with his wife and their “True, you have irreconcilable differences, but they’re mainly about flossing.” teen-age daughter, two curly-haired mutts, and fifty thousand spiders, half of them black widows. He called the place •• the Spider Pharm. The Pharm was a final twist on hu- chiffon and stacked in six-foot metal has been on the market since 2004. manity’s old ambivalence toward spi- racks. The tarantulas were in larger con- Known as Prialt, it’s considerably more ders—an attempt to find the virtues in tainers and had their own, steamier room. powerful than morphine. venom. Kristensen had come up with the A few spiders escaped every so often, he Binford looked around, grinning, en- idea in the late nineteen-seventies, while said, but most of them were eaten by the tirely at home. Then she ran out to the car studying for his master’s degree in chem- daddy longlegs that patrolled the halls. to get the cooler full of spiders that she’d istry at California State University at After the tour, Kristensen brought in collected. She seemed proud and a little Long Beach. Drug companies had a long a tub of homegrown maggots for the spi- nervous showing them off, like a kid with history of prospecting for chemicals in ders—the babies had to be fed every day, some brand-new Hot Wheels. She was the rain forest, but venom struck Kris- the adults once a week—and Anita especially excited about those she’d found tensen as a more promising source. Its milked a few recluses. First, she tranquil- earlier that day, in a desert reserve outside toxins were already targeted at cells and lized the spiders with carbon-dioxide gas Palm Springs. They looked like Loxosce- nerve receptors, and prepackaged for in- (it lowered their oxygen levels until they les martha, she said, the last of the North jection with stabilizers and emulsifiers. passed out), then she grasped one with a American species she had left to find. The problem was getting a sufficient pair of tweezers, held it under a micro- Kristensen held one up to the light. He supply. Sitting in a Big Boy restaurant scope, and stepped on a foot switch. The peered at its appendages and noted its fine one morning, Kristensen sketched a de- tweezers were wired to an electrical stim- orange color, and soon they were chatting sign for a spider-milking machine—the ulator. When Anita’s foot hit the switch, companionably about genitalia. first of its kind—then began to collect the spider received a small shock, which It was well past midnight before we and breed dozens of species for their made its venom gland contract. This left. Chuck packed up a few spiders for venom. “I didn’t give a shit if they were forced a droplet through the fangs, where Binford to take home, and Anita found killing people,” he told me. “All I cared Anita caught it in a thin glass tube. some keepsakes for my children: a brown about was what was in them.” “I never touched a spider in my life be- recluse and a pair of black-widow venom Kristensen is fifty-six years old now, fore I met Chuck,” she said, as a pair of glands, preserved in gel. They’d been small and rangy, with scraggly sideburns fangs ballooned into view under the mi- handing them out at local schools, she and dishevelled gray hair. While his wife, croscope. “But I liked it right away. It said, but some people just have a thing Anita—a handsome Czech woman with never gets boring.” On a good day, Anita against spiders. As we drove off, I looked auburn hair—made coffee and sliced up might milk a thousand spiders and get back at the two of them, waving goodbye some oranges, he showed us around the less than a thimbleful of venom. Yet med- under the porch light, and thought of house. This was the Pharm’s seventh lo- ical biologists had found a remarkable Jean-Henri Fabre in his meadow. “To ap- cation, he said. At the last place, in range of compounds in it over the years— point oneself, in this way, an inspector of Feasterville, Pennsylvania, the township from a Chilean-tarantula toxin that stops spiders’ webs for many years in succes- manager had shown up with a policeman heart fibrillations to a Chinese-tarantula sion, and for long seasons, means joining one day and given them ten days to “va- toxin that prompts insulin secretions. a not overcrowded profession,” he wrote. cate the spiders.” Kristensen kept the None had yet been turned into a drug, but “No matter: the meditative mind returns smaller species in plastic cups covered in a painkiller based on cone-snail venom from that school fully satisfied.” 

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