Sensitivity training for 8 legged exhibits

IN a workroom on the fifth floor of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, six tarantulas are about to undergo sensitivity training. The creatures, of a desert species called Chilean rose hairs for their tinted furry legs, are expected to have a starring role in a new exhibition, “Spiders Alive!”, that opens in late July. They will be picked up and displayed by trained staff members and volunteers to give visitors a closer look. But to ensure that the tarantulas can handle all that handling, they need to be prepared. “Spiders feel their world around them from vibrations and from movements,” said Hazel Davies, the museum’s director of living exhibits. Although Chilean rose hairs are among the most easygoing and benign of tarantulas — they rarely bite and their venom is not particularly dangerous — unfamiliar vibrations can make them skittish. So Ms. Davies and her assistants will start by removing the lids from the spiders’ terrariums and talking over them, so they feel the vibrations of speech. If they can deal with that, some light touching will follow. “We’ll work through stages of being able to just pick them up,” she said. The need to train spiders is just one of the challenges involved in exhibiting living organisms at a museum that is more accustomed to dealing with fossils and preserved specimens. Like many other natural science museums, in recent years the American Museum of Natural History has found that live exhibits are another way to engage visitors. “It’s just another dimension of how we bring nature inside,” said Michael J. Novacek, the museum’s provost. “It’s so important in an urban environment, because a lot of people who come into the institution will never see or experience nature in the same way.” The museum has found that live exhibits — starting with its butterfly conservatory, now in its 14th year — are extremely popular. Of the new exhibit, Norman I. Platnick, the museum’s curator of spiders, said, “I’ve always argued that it would draw as many people as the dinosaurs, if not more.” Mr. Platnick, who has been at the museum since 1973, had long lobbied for a permanent hall devoted to spiders, insects and other arthropods. Not having one, he said, “is a major gap for a major natural history museum.” On a few occasions plans were drawn up, he recalled, “but when people took a hard look at what it would cost to construct such a hall, the project always went away.” The new exhibition, which museum officials say will run every other year, will be relatively small and will focus on spiders and other arachnids, including scorpions. “But that’s fine because I don’t have to deal with insects that I don’t know anything about,” Mr. Platnick said. Still, planning for the exhibit has been complicated, involving frequent discussions among curators, display designers and Ms. Davies. A basic issue has been which of the roughly 42,000 recognized species of spiders to put on display. “Obviously what I would love to have is the largest diversity possible,” Mr. Platnick said. “We hope to have all kinds of ordinary spiders — sea wolf spiders, jumping spiders, fishing spiders — and some of the more unusual things you wouldn’t come across in this part of the world.” “The difficulty is merging a live organism exhibit with our standard exhibitionary techniques,” he said. Many spiders are so small they would be difficult for visitors to see. Most are nocturnal and do not move much during the day. So the exhibit will rely on videos of some species that are not practical to exhibit. Live specimens will be behind glass, Ms. Davies said. “It’s a case of thinking about the display habitats that we’re going to set up for them and how that’s going to work so that it will be comfortable for the spider but so that people can also engage with them and actually see something,” she said. Two trapdoor spiders, for example, burrow into soil. For visitors to be able to see the burrows the display has to be designed something like an ant farm, so that the spiders will burrow against the glass. Even then the burrows may quickly become lined with silk. Another challenge will be keeping some specimens alive until the exhibit closes in early December. Most spiders are seasonal — they hatch in the spring, grow in the summer and die well before their first birthday. “Trying to prolong these things very far into the fall will be problematic because they will be getting to their normal age limitations,” Mr. Platnick said. Other species may be difficult to obtain in the first place. “It’s a challenge between what has an interesting story but what will also make a good display animal and what we can get without trekking off to Borneo or somewhere and taking it out of the wild,” Ms. Davies said. Some may not survive shipping, even overnight. Mr. Platnick has been sending out feelers to his friends in academia in search of specimens. The trapdoor spiders came from a colleague in Alabama. Members of the most primitive spider family, the liphistiidae, are found only in the wild in Southeast Asia, but Mr. Platnick knows a scientist in Switzerland who has two of them. A postdoctoral researcher at the museum who is going to Europe in June will bring them back. Many spiders come from domestic breeders. Ms. Davies recently picked up several ornamental tarantulas, including some gooty sapphires, from a breeder on Long Island (“We did a handover since it was so close,” she said. “It’s quicker and less stressful for the animals.”) The Chilean rose hairs were shipped from Ohio. The tarantulas are all females, because they tend to be larger and live longer than males (although most tarantulas, male or female, can live for many years). Ms. Davies keeps a stock of live crickets and cockroaches on hand to feed the rose hairs and others, which sit in terrariums (alone, as spiders tend to eat roommates) on both sides of the workroom and in the hall. For the Chilean rose hairs and other docile species, the handlers will play an important role. “This is different from anything we’ve done before,” said Ms. Davies, whose department is in charge of training the handlers. “We’ve never had a set-up demonstration area where we can have the animals out and have somebody there doing an interactive show.” In all, at least 14 large spiders will be available for the demonstrations. “They’ll work a half a day each and then they’ll rest,” Ms. Davies said. “Good work if you can get it, right?”