Do black widows eat their mates?
We interrupt this tranquil Sunday morning to bring you this important news announcement: Our Woodland Park Zoo has started a propaganda campaign on behalf of spiders. With us here today is Erin Sullivan. She’s lead keeper of an exhibit called “Masters of the Web,” which starts Memorial Day Weekend and runs through Halloween. (Now there’s a bad choice of holidays for image changing.) She’s an entomologist, which means she loves insects. So do spiders — but for lunch. Rod Crawford, curator of arachnids at the Burke Museum, joins us, at least in spirit. Rumor has it Crawford is nocturnal. In fact, he was reached by phone in his lab at midnight, where his research feeds not only projects such as the zoo’s but also his own “The Spider Myths Site,” ranked by Internet users as among the most cool. It is unusual for a zoo to create a display on a creature so many people find scary (a fear some say is an evolutionary survival mechanism and a displaced connection between spiders and disease duri
