Still, spiders are not hamsters, and on the door of his lab at Hiram College’s J. H. Barrow Field Station, 20 miles southeast of Cleveland, Marshall has posted rules for visitors: “Do not open or move any container. Many tarantula species are very fast and aggressive and will bite. Accidentally releasing a tarantula could end badly for both you and the spider. Please don’t take any unsupervised tours!” But Marshall is happy to supervise visits and proudly declares, “This is the only comparative tarantula lab that is global in reach.”

Sam Marshall holds a pinktoe tarantula he found on a tree in French Guiana. The spider is docile but its hairs are irritants.  Marshall’s hand itched for days after this picture was taken.

To prove it, he points out a silver and black Heteroscodra maculata, originally from Cameroon, that resides in a wide-mouthed plastic coffee jug marked “USE EXTREME CAUTION” and “POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS.” In a glass jar that once held 155 pieces of watermelon-flavored taffy, he has restrained an iridescent Avicularia metallica, collected off a tree at a rest stop along Route 1 outside Cayenne, French Guiana.


There are Tanzanian chestnut tarantulas in plastic food tubs, and baby blonde-leg tarantulas in potato-salad deli cups. Marshall says his spiders are comfortable. Few tarantulas roam widely, preferring to live out their lives almost entirely within inches of their burrows. “You can say tarantulas are agoraphobics,” he said. “See how they live in the wild: one foot in a tidy, snug hole. Tarantulas just do their thing, whether they’re in a plastic container from Wal-Mart or on the side of a tree in South America.”

All in all, there are about 500 live tarantulas in a room the size of a spacious kitchen. Many of them were originally housed at Marshall’s house, where he kept “a big collection” of tarantulas for a number of years. How big? “Hundreds,” he answers. “Hundreds. Hundreds.” During his postdoctoral years at Miami University in Ohio, he had a two-bedroom apartment—“one people bedroom, one tarantula bedroom.” He had already married a fellow arachnologist, Maggie Hodge, who clearly did not mind spiders. She did not, however, like the rattlesnake that was living in his closet when they met at the University of Cincinnati.

Marshall’s course in life was set in his teens—possibly from the moment he saw his first tarantula in a tank on the desk of a U.S. Park Service ranger in New Mexico. “I saw that and thought it was the most amazing thing,” says Marshall. The large spiders soon joined the menagerie of exotic poultry, turtles, snakes, monitor lizards, and falcons he kept in sheds behind his parents’ house in Mount Kisco, New York, and in their labyrinthine basement. When he was an undergrad at Bard College in New York, tarantulas shared his dorm room with a hawk, ferrets, a monitor lizard, and a ball python. (The dean of students made him move his scorpions to the biology department.)

“I think of myself as a xenophile,” Marshall says. “I was drawn to things that are different.” And what could possibly be more different than a tarantula—a big, hairy spider who wears her skeleton on the outside, who smells and tastes with her feet, and whose fanged, eye-covered head is also endowed with eight legs, two arms, and a sucking stomach?

Tarantulas are far less dangerous to humans than other spiders, such as the black widow. No tarantula’s venom is toxic enough to kill a human, and they seldom bite. But they shed their hairs—projections on the exoskeleton called setae.

Although tarantula hobbyists have endured the hairs for decades, the details of their use for defense were not studied until the 1970s, when researchers discovered that some of them seem to be designed to defend against a single species. The hairs of the Mexican blonde tarantula, for instance, are adapted to irritate only the nasal passages of the grasshopper mouse—a job they do so well that they can kill the rodent.

So far, seven structurally distinct types of defensive hairs have been recognized; Marshall discovered one of those and found new uses for several others. Some species, for example, shed clouds of golden hairs from their mouths; others shed from their bellies. One sheds hairs onto egg sacs to protect its young from predators and parasites. The goliath birdeater, Marshall found, uses its hairs to create a special silken mat on which it lies upside down when molting. But perhaps the most original use to which tarantulas have put their copious hair—including the goliath birdeater—is to make noise.

The goliath makes the loudest sound of any spider—a hiss audible from 10 feet away and designed to scare off predators. Marshall discovered that the noise comes from a scrubbing motion the tarantula makes with the two food-handling arms at the front of its head and the first two pairs of its walking legs. The noise sounds like strips of Velcro being ripped apart and is created in much the same manner—by entangling the microscopic hooks of one set of leg hairs with the filaments of another and pulling them away from each other.