Q & A with Greta Binford

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Nov 23, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

KATIE HARTLEY / TRIBUNE PHOTOS

Greta Binford, an arachnologist and assistant professor of biology at Lewis & Clark College, hangs out in the lab with a Drymusa spider. Spiders don’t bite her — some even helped her out with a household ant problem.

Every Friday, the Portland Tribune puts questions to a prominent – or not so prominent – local person.

Jumping spiders have humongous eyes. They sneak up on their prey and pounce. Trapdoor spiders make underground burrows with camouflaged lids on top. They open the lids with their fangs, dash out and pull their victims back inside. Scytodes spit toxic glue that paralyzes their quarry.

And Greta Binford? She collects them all. And lives to tell the tale.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” says the 42-year-old Lewis & Clark College arachnologist and evolutionary biologist, whose free time is spent rummaging under logs in Africa and inside South American caves.

“I go to these glamorous places and collect in rubbish piles outside of town,” she says.

Binford, one of maybe 10 spider venom experts in the world, was called in as a consultant for the Spider-Man movies. Be nice, and she’ll show you her collection of live spiders from around the world, including black widows piled into little plastic containers, waiting for Binford to milk them for venom.

So what, exactly, does the intrepid Binford fear?

“Lightning,” she says, “because it can kill you.”

Portland Tribune: Are spiders social animals?

Greta Binford: No, not typically. Generally they are so nonsocial they eat each other.

Tribune: And yet you like to study social spiders.

Binford: There are a few spiders that have evolved to a place where they live together in big colonies that can have hundreds of thousands of individual spiders.

There are webs down there (in South America) that are the length of a football field. The spiders work together, they clean the web together, they catch prey together, and the biggest thing is they take care of each other’s babies to the extent that a female will regurgitate food for the offspring of another female.

Tribune: Friendly. But your specialty is poisonous spiders, isn’t it? Why is that?

Binford: I learned we don’t know very much about them, and that little old me can actually make contributions to science. All that was eye-opening to me.

All of this diversity, there are 40,000 species of spiders, and all of them are predators and they use a range of tactics for catching prey. But the tools they use are silk and venom.

A single spider has venom that contains between 200 and 1,000 different toxins. I want to know how those venom cocktails evolved.

Tribune: Sounds like you get to go on some fantastic adventures in search of those cocktails. Any favorites?

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