YPSILANTI, MI — Cara Shillington’s love for tarantulas began when a college friend recommended them as house pets.
The Cape Town, South Africa native never thought of having a pet tarantula before, but she got one when she was an undergraduate student at Washington State University in the early 1990s because she “thought it would be cool.”
Three decades later, the thought has evolved into a profound admiration for the creature.
Eventually, she lost track of how many tarantulas she had.
“Within a few months and years, I had a bunch of tarantulas and then started really looking to see what I could do with getting involved with something with research,” Shillington, 66, said.
Now a professor of biology at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Shillington has dedicated her academic career to the study of arachnids and their natural histories.
On Tuesday, Sept. 23, she and Spencer Poscente, a graduate student studying ecology, evolution and organismal biology at EMU, headed to the annual La Junta Tarantula Fest in Colorado.
The tarantula festival, from Friday, Sept. 26 to Saturday, Sept. 27, is a yearly academic conference that brings together arachnid enthusiasts in time for the mating season.
Each fall, large numbers of male tarantulas skitter across the Comanche National Grassland in southeast Colorado looking to mate.
Shillington will be a guest speaker and Poscente, 28, will help plan a tarantula tour.
Outside of the festival, Shillington and Poscente plan to collect field data on tarantulas, especially at night when tarantulas are most active.
“We pull these really long nights and then every now and again you have the most incredible moonrise in the middle of (the night), you’re out there and there’s nobody else,” Shillington said. “You’re just with your animals and nobody else in terms of other humans.”
If they are lucky, they get a couple of hours sleep in the afternoon. “And then we do that for the next couple of days,” Shillington said.
The EMU professor has a soft spot for spider-friendly Colorado.
“The little town that we work in, everybody is very positive about the tarantulas and the fact that they live so close and have the tarantulas there,” Shillington said.
Shillington said tarantulas are exciting because of “how little we know about them” in their natural environments.
She said tarantulas are difficult organisms to study because of their long lives. They reach sexual maturity when at eight to nine years, meaning that researchers must monitor them for eight to nine years prior to their sexual changes.
“The field work is really difficult when you find an animal out there, you have no idea how old it is,” she said. “It’s very difficult to see little snapshots of their life history that you have to try and piece together.”
Tarantulas can live up to 30 years in the wild, according to National Geographic.
Much of Shillington’s research has been on thermal regulations of tarantula movements and male mating patterns.
Shillington has had her fair share of criticism for her arachnid studies. She said while “people do think it’s interesting, at least somewhat,” she mentioned a graduate student once told her “he would kill my animals if they ever got out of their containers.”
“It’s interesting how people respond to tarantulas,” Shillington said.
Her family remains staunch supporters of her work. Shillington said her husband takes her field photographs and visits her research sites with their dog.
“She (the dog) didn’t let tarantulas crawl over her but she was in close proximity to all of the tarantulas,” Shillington said.
She said her mother-in-law put spiders on her wedding cake, all part of her “very supportive family.”
Poscente said he was impressed by Shillington’s enthusiasm for tarantulas when he first he encountered her through an undergraduate class at EMU.
“Southeast Michigan, where we don’t have tarantulas, we do have one of top tarantula researchers, Cara,” said Poscente, of Las Vegas.
The biggest difficulty in Shillington’s arachnid research is the lack of tarantulas in Michigan, Shillington said.
Shillington and her team have to travel out of Michigan to conduct their field studies.
“We’re doing three trips over the semester, but we both work, we’re also teaching classes, we’re doing this big juggle with minimal money,” she said. “I really wish there was a way for more of my students to be able to be out there for some of these periods and the mating season was during the summer.”
Shillington also wants tarantula haters to spend time with the creatures.
“We’re afraid of things we don’t know,” Shillington said. “When we’re uncomfortable is sometimes the times we are learning the most, so be willing to embrace that discomfort.”
And she is not afraid of spiders.
Her first pet tarantula was a pink toe and her second was a rose hair tarantula. The ones after are a jumbled memory to her.
She enthusiastically said she has thousands of spiders in her home.
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