Audio By Carbonatix
Are you detail-oriented? Is your spidey sense tingling? If so, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science wants you. Arachnophobes can check out right now: The museum seeks citizen scientists interested in signing up for summer workshops offering hands-on training on how to hunt for spiders, garden-variety and otherwise. Folks with a propensity can then participate in the Colorado Spider Survey, an ongoing ten-year venture that’s literally uncovering new spider species all over the state. In other words, if you can’t handle getting up-close and personal with a bunch of eight-legged, creepy-crawly things, it’d make for an awfully long, icky summer.
“Spiders are an unpopular group,” museum arachnologist Paula Cushing notes. “They’re misunderstood and pretty understudied, so there are a lot of information gaps regarding species diversity and distribution. With more popular groups like birds or mammals, we pretty much know what species exist on earth, but with spiders and other arthropod groups, we don’t have that kind of knowledge. The project is a way to fill in those gaps.”
Now in its third year, the program has been a smashing success. “We’ve taught over 400 people about spiders, and about 20 percent of those people become really actively involved,” Cushing says. “A lot of CSS people are now purchasing their own microscopes and doing documentation on their own. The amount of closet arachnophiles out there is really amazing.” Participating citizen scientists have already discovered zodariidae — an entire new family of spiders in Colorado never documented before, she adds, and twenty more regional species not previously seen in Colorado have been found, as well.
Aside from the glory involved, though, it’s also fun and educational. “It’s a great way to get the word out to people about biodiversity,” Cushing says. “But it’s also an opportunity to see a different part of world than they might otherwise see. When people lift up rocks to look for spiders, they’re constantly amazed by how much actually lives underneath their feet.”
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