SPIDER WOMAN.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-MAR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Early one morning last year, when the streets of downtown Los Angeles were still mostly deserted, a strange figure appeared in the Goodwill store at 235 South Broadway, next door to the Guadalupe Wedding Chapel. She had on tennis shoes, dungarees, and a faded blue T-shirt, and was outfitted as if for a safari or a spelunking expedition. A khaki vest was stuffed with empty plastic vials; a black duffelbag across her shoulders held a pair of high-tech headlamps, a digital camera, and a venom extractor. She made her way to the front desk, past a rack of summer dresses on sale for six dollars and ninety-nine cents. Then she introduced herself to the store manager, Gina Torres, a statuesque woman with silver-blond hair and thickly drawn eyeliner. She said that her name was Greta Binford and she wanted to hunt spiders in the basement.

Torres stared at her. Binford is small and keen-eyed, with a dark-brown bob and a scattering of freckles across her nose. Her voice has a quick, clear, almost chirping quality, and at forty-one she car-ries herself with the springy assurance of a high-school cheerleader. She didn't look like a crackpot to Torres. Then again, she didn't look like a spider hunter, either. Perhaps she was a health inspector. "I've never heard anything about you," Torres said, her eyes narrowing. "I've been here two years, and I've never seen you before."

Binford explained to Torres that she was a professor of biology at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon. She specialized in arachnology and was on a weeklong spider-hunting trip through the Southwest. She'd been to this store before, years ago, to collect an interesting species that lived in the basement. "I just need an hour or so to get a few more specimens," Binford said. What she didn't say was that they were among the deadliest spiders in the world.

They belonged to a South American species called Loxosceles laeta--a cousin of the brown recluse, but larger and more venomous. Sometime in the late nineteen-sixties, apparently, their ancestors had ridden to California in costume crates owned by a troupe of Shakespearean actors from Brazil. A year or two later, they were discovered at a theatre in the L.A. suburb of Sierra Madre and promptly triggered a citywide panic. "50 DEADLY SPIDERS FOUND," a front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times announced on June 7, 1969. "VENOM LIKE RATTLESNAKE'S." In Sierra Madre, spider suspects were rushed to the police in jam jars, ice-cream boxes, and Styrofoam cups. "Some have shown up around 3 A.M. in the trembling hands of frantic householders," the Times reported. By August of that year, more than two hundred laeta--as well as a thousand of their molted skins--had been found across Los Angeles. One family of eight abandoned their home at the sight of a single spider.

The Great Spider Hunt of 1969 ended as such scares usually do: attics were cleared, toolsheds swept clean, buildings fumigated and declared safe. Yet the spiders remained. Buildings like the Goodwill store had basements and sub-basements so deep and interconnected that no pesticide could reach into every hiding place. "I showed one of the spiders to an employee the last time I was here," Binford told me. "And she said, 'Yeah, I see those in the bathroom all the time.' " No bites had been reported, but word seemed to have got out that something was not quite right in the basement. Torres told Binford that no one was allowed downstairs, for reasons of liability. "You have to understand," she said. "I have to protect myself."

Binford spent the next hour on her cell phone, pleading her case with Goodwill executives. She was thumbing through a rack of used Hawaiian shirts, awaiting the management's verdict, when an irritated voice blared over the intercom, "Spider lady! Spider lady! Come to the front!" Torres was standing by the cash register, her hands on her hips. She made Binford scrawl out a waiver on a legal pad, then led her down a long, dingy hallway to the basement door. "It's your own risk," she said, pointing down the stairwell. "If I don't hear from you in two days, I call the authorities."

Spiders have a bad reputation, largely undeserved. The great majority aren't venomous enough to harm us, or their fangs are too small, or their jaw muscles are too puny, or they simply see no profit in attacking large, indigestible creatures that can crush them with their toes. Unlike snake venom, which is designed to kill vertebrates, spider venom is almost always meant for insects. Its toxins can stop a hornet in mid-flight, but they lack proper targets in the human nervous system. "If we were wired for spider venoms the way insects are, we would be screwed," Binford says.

Still, some spiders can kill you, and they're the ones that interest Binford. She has spent the past ten years collecting venomous species worldwide, raising them in her lab, and patiently milking their fangs. A single spider can inject its victims with as many as two hundred compounds: proteases that dissolve flesh, gelatinases that dissolve connective tissues, neurotoxins that short-circuit nerves, slow the heart, and freeze the limbs. A spider's venom offers a window onto its evolution, Binford says--a chemical record of its most successful experiments at killing prey. It's also a storehouse of potential pharmaceuticals, one that remains virtually untapped. "There aren't any spiders for which we know all the chemicals in their venom," she says. "None."

In the United States, two groups of spiders are widely considered dangerous: black widows and brown recluses, along with their close relatives. Widows are small creatures, potbellied and delicately articulated, often with a red or yellow hourglass on the abdomen. They can be found in cellars, garages, and woodpiles in every state, and seem to be fond of filth. (They're notorious for...

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