There is an article about one of my favorite professors at Eastern, Cara Shillington in Biology. She is trying her noble best to dispel the bad press that spiders receive, especially during these Halloween days.
“Spider woman: Halloween anti-arachnid bias bugs biology teacher”
Halloween inspires boo-hoos in Cara Shillington, 39, an associate professor of biology at Eastern Michigan University. It’s not the costumes and candy that get to her; it’s the scary spider decorations, which seem like a smear campaign against her favorite animals. Cara keeps more than 200 tarantulas in her lab and sees every one as “beautiful and fascinating.” A citizen of South Africa, Cara lives in Ypsilanti with her husband.
Ha ha. Like I’m going to fall for this!
Little spiders that JUMP anchor the bottom end of the (non-zero) creepy scale, scorpions ON YOUR BED in a CAPITAL CITY (of a specific, but here unnamed, foreign country) anchor the top end. In between are tarantulas (toward the bottom end because they are slow and hairy) and a mouse trapped (for the moment!) in your kitchen sink. Brrr!
Prof. Shillington, congratulations on this article in the FREE PRESS! And thanks for getting EMU some well deserved
favorable pulblicity! We’re a university with top notch scholar-teachers like Prof. Shillington, and the FREE PRESS article has both a nice human interest tie in to Halloween and real scientific content.
One of the things I’ve learned from Prof. Shillington is that, contrary to popular belief, spiders in Michigan are very unlikely to bite people; most times people believe that it’s a spinder bite, it’s almost certainly not but is instead a bite of some insect.