KU spider expert wants to tour homes for brown recluse research

LAWRENCE -- Jamél Sandidge is not a physician, but he wants you to know he is available for house calls.

Sandidge, a doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, has become one of the most sought-after experts on the dangerous brown recluse spider. To help answer the thousands of questions he gets each year about spiders, bites and the best ways to spider-proof homes, Sandidge created the Recluse Community Project, which can be viewed at www.recluseproject.ku.edu.

His current research seeks to determine what it is about human homes that brown recluses find more appealing than living in wild fields.

That's why he'd like to pay your home a visit.

Sandidge hopes to observe 10 to 20 homes in the Lawrence area this summer. During his initial visit, which most likely would last between 30 and 45 minutes, he will place sticky traps in strategic locations around the house and draw a map of those sites. After that, he'll return once a week for a 10-minute visit to check up on the progress and change out the traps.

And don't worry about tidying up for his visit.

The vibrations from your vacuum can greatly disturb the spiders, making them vacate their homes in agitated and aggressive moods, increasing your chances of getting bitten. On top of that, you might be clearing away some of the clues that help him determine where the spiders live, how many are present and the pathways they use to get into your home, as well as a number of other hints.

"Don't kill the spider when you see it, watch to understand," he said. "See where it goes and what it does. Then you can have a better clue. Instead of killing that one, it could lead you back to 25 other spiders."

Most homeowners would rather live in denial than face the possibility of finding several more spiders, but that's only asking for more trouble, he said.

"A lot of people don't want to know if they have recluses," he said. "But they are the same ones who will walk in here and say, 'I've just been bitten by a spider, what is it?'"

Those bites can cause serious problems for people and their pets. Some people may not even know they are allergic to brown recluse bites, in which case a single bite can prove fatal.

No one wants to hear the news that his or her home is infested with these dangerous visitors, but it's the first step to getting them removed, Sandidge said.

"It's not people that know they have the spider that get bitten, it's the ones who don't know they have the spiders that get bitten because they don't take the precautions necessary," he said.

Last summer, Sandidge did a similar study in the Lawrence area and found that the homes he sampled had an average of 53 brown recluse spiders. A couple of homes had only one or two spiders, but some, including one in Old West Lawrence, had several hundred.

Part of the battle in fighting the spiders is overcoming the sheer amount of misinformation out there, he said. For starters, you can't always identify the brown recluse by its supposed trademark: an inverted violin shape at the base of its head. Secondly, contrary to popular opinion, they are not likely to be in your attic; they are most likely to seek out dry, isolated places, in your basement, garage, garden shed, or next to your furnace or water heater.

Sandidge's research is gaining attention, not only from people wanting bites diagnosed but from entomologists as well. He recently discovered that brown recluses have the very un-spider-like tendency to rely on eating dead insects that they find, instead of killing the prey and eating it. Sandidge said overpopulation may have caused the spiders to become scavengers rather than hunters.

In the past year, Sandidge said he has captured more than 46,000 spiders, answered more than 6,000 e-mails identifying spiders and bites, and granted countless requests for interviews by reporters. His future research projects include determining whether brown recluses travel from house to house, and observing them in the wild to determine why their populations tend to be much lower in nature as opposed to inside homes.

"They're not supposed to be in houses, so I want to see how humans have changed the population structure and genetics of the spider and how the spider has benefited from living in human structures," he said. "I need people who want to find out more about these recluses and want to solve the problem -- and people who won't mind me poking around."

To learn more about brown recluse spiders or to volunteer your home for Sandidge's research, visit the Recluse Community Web site.