Sam Marshall doesn’t waste much time. Seconds after stepping into the steaming rain forest of French Guiana, he announces his agenda: “Let’s divide and search for holes with big, hairy legs.”

After all, he hasn’t come to French Guiana for the beaches (muddy and shark infested), the food (cheese, bread, and sardines), or the shopping (none, but credit cards can be used to dig out ticks). He has come for the tarantulas—tarantulas that are big enough to eat birds.


When threatened, the Usambara orange tarantula can get very aggressive. It rears up, slaps the ground, hisses loudly, and even drips venom from its fangs. “They don’t try to bite very much,” says arachnologist Sam Marshall. “It’s really just a display.”

French Guiana, best known for the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony, is the tarantula capital of the world. The size of Indiana, this South American protectorate hosts at least a dozen species, including the world’s largest, Theraphosa blondi, the goliath birdeater. To Marshall, an assistant professor of biology at Hiram College in Ohio, the jungle here is a little bit of heaven. Within minutes, the 45-year-old arachnologist is lying blissfully on his belly, poking a twig down a foot-long tunnel. “Come out!” he calls into the tunnel. “I want to meet you!”

Marshall’s freckled face is inches from a fist-size hole inhabited by a quarter-pound tarantula. Make that an angry quarter-pound tarantula. With a walnut-size abdomen and a head as large as a 50-cent piece, the goliath birdeater has a 12-inch-wide leg span that could cover your face. Or in this case, Marshall’s face.

“Oh! Now she’s kicking!” Marshall says as he shines his headlamp into the hole. “She might be kicking hairs! Can you hear her hissing?”

A rasping sound comes from the hole. But Marshall holds his ground. A few seconds later, he wishes he hadn’t. His face is itching and burning. The goliath birdeater has used her hind legs to kick microscopically barbed hairs off her abdomen. They ended up in Marshall’s face, irritating his skin, eyes, and nose. Despite its size, the goliath isn’t deadly to humans, but its defense mechanisms are more than unpleasant.

For Marshall, a face full of tarantula hair is part of the job. And before long he’s back looking into the same hole. So little is known about the goliath that despite its name (bestowed because an early specimen was recorded feeding on a songbird), nobody actually knows what it normally eats. Only twice has the species been seen making a kill in the wild—once an earthworm, another time a caecilian, an amphibian. To Marshall, such ignorance is indicative of what’s wrong with arachnology. “Here we have the biggest of something in the world, and nobody studies it!” he says.

Despite the growing number of humans who seem to enjoy keeping tarantulas as pets, the spiders are mostly a mystery. Marshall is one of only a dozen arachnologists worldwide specializing in them—and the only scientist who runs a lab full of tarantulas gathered from around the globe. He is also the only scientist who has written a popular book about the creatures: Tarantulas and Other Arachnids: A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual. “It’s a pretty huge unfilled niche that he’s in,” says Jonathan Coddington, an arachnologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

Scientists have long dismissed tarantulas as too primitive to exhibit interesting behavior. Arising 150 million years ago from a smaller, hairy ancestor, the creatures retain such primitive characteristics as fangs that move up and down instead of sideways, and they don’t weave webs. In his Biology of Spiders (1982 edition), German arachnologist Ranier Foelix barely mentions tarantulas. “Not long ago,” wrote English biologist T. H. Savory of Malvern College, “the spiders were the most neglected of the most interesting animals.”

Another reason for the neglect has been the tarantulas themselves. They are more difficult to study than common garden spiders. They tend to live deep in sometimes-twisting holes in the sweaty tropics, they’re too big to fit under a microscope, and females can live for 30 years, making for long time frames between generations and slow captive breeding.

Marshall, son of the late actor E. G. Marshall, is changing that—and at the same time, he hopes, the tarantula’s image as the bloodthirsty villain of grade B horror films. He says part of his job is to “de-demonize these spiders. They don’t have a bloodlust to bite people. They’re just little fuzzy creatures, and if you handle them correctly, they’re harmless. I just basically make them seem like interesting animals rather than some horrible creature.”

His studies have revealed a surprising aspect of the breed: Tarantulas share many behaviors with mammals. Like most spiders, they seem to be solitary cannibals, so intolerant of company that some females snack on their suitors. But others tenderly care for their young, and tarantula families sometimes share food. Mother tarantulas are known to go without eating so that their offspring can eat. Muses Marshall, “Who’d have thought that the world’s scariest spider would have family values?”