Showing posts with label celebrities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label celebrities. Show all posts

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Celebrity Spiders

I was watching The Tonight Show on Wednesday, December 18, and one of the guests was actress Christina Applegate. I don’t normally pay much mind to celebrities, but when she started talking about a spider that is living outside a window of her home, my ears perked up. She and her daughter have more or less adopted the arachnid and named her “Seymour.”

Ok, obviously, they named the spider before it was determined to be a female. Ms. Applegate has kept a running account of their spider via tweets on Twitter, including the above picture. There has been much chatter on her Twitter page, most of it supportive and helpful. Christina informed The Tonight Show audience that “Seymour” had been identified as a Tropical Orbweaver, Eriophora ravilla, which at first glance it resembles. I remembered that this species does not occur in southern California, though, and took a closer look at the image. Ah, Araneus gemma instead. I tweeted the correction, but never got a response. Gee, Christina can’t be *that* swamped, right?

While she admitted that if a spider that size were found inside her house, “it would be on the bottom of my shoe,” she and her daughter have embraced Seymour as an “outdoor” spider. They even sing to it at bedtime.

We cannot have enough positive stories like this of both parenting and arachnid appreciation. It is encouraging the number of celebrities who share their passion for the eight-legged world.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dominic Monaghan, “Charlie” of Lost fame, when he came through the 25th annual “Bug Fair” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History back in May, 2011. He, too, had been on The Tonight Show, where he had talked about joining an expedition to search for an enormous tarantula species recently re-discovered in a museum collection. I asked if he had gone and he said they hadn’t been able to make it happen. Since, then, Dominic has gone on several expeditions for his BBC America series Wild Things. His “average Joe” approach is refreshing, and he is usually cautious in handling venomous species. He makes a good ambassador for popular entomology, arachnology, and herpetology.

Back on Twitter, Heidi Klum, the supermodel, made headlines by tweeting a photo of herself posing with “Brutus,” a large tarantula, her “new friend for the day.” That one photo op can cause such a sensation should not be dismissed. The American Arachnological Society might do well to find a celebrity spokesperson for arachnids, or even enlist someone from its own ranks, like Dr. Greta Binford.

The point is, we can make a big impact on changing public attitudes towards organisms that are traditionally feared, but we might have to cozy up to the media. Scientists are loathe to speak to journalists since there have been so many misquotes, and information taken out of context, in previous history. We have to keep trying, though, and become the media ourselves through blogs, social media, and other creative outlets. Heck, don’t just read my blog, “re-tweet” it, and more importantly, write your own, too.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Spider Sunday: Spiders and Celebrities

Nobody has a neutral reaction to spiders, so it comes as no surprise that celebrities find themselves on one side of the fence or the other regarding their affection or disdain for the arachnid world.

Humorist David Sedaris has a fascination with the Giant House Spider, Tegenaria duellica. He wrote about them in the essay “April in Paris” in the book When You Are Engulfed in Flames. “April” is the name of one of the spiders that the author found inside his home in Normandy, France. He fed her flies and watched her behavior on his windowsill. He became so enamored that (in the essay at least) he took her to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower.

Actor Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory on CBS television pretended to be scared of spiders when he presented the word “arachnid” on an episode of Sesame Street. His real-life reaction is much more admirable: “….I’m not terribly afraid of them. I have a lot in my house, but I try not to kill them. I just shuffle them outside with a piece of paper.”

Dominic Monaghan of Lost fame is incredibly spider-friendly. He was set to join an expedition two or three years ago to re-discover an African tarantula, Hysterocrates hercules, known currently only from a museum specimen collected in Nigeria in the late 1890s (its description published in 1899). I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Mr. Monaghan at the annual “Bug Fair” in Los Angeles last May. He told me that the mission had yet to take place but that he was still optimistic that it would happen.

The spider-celebrity connection works the other way, too. Several recently-described species have been named after contemporary celebrities. Pachygnatha zappa immortalizes legendary rocker Frank Zappa. The species was collected on Mount Cameroon in Africa.

The North American trapdoor spider genus Aptostichus has species named after Angelina Jolie and Stephen Colbert. Jason Bond, the scientist and professor at East Carolina University who named these spiders also christened another trapdoor spider after Canadian musician Neil Young.

I hope that the celebrities feel honored to have arachnids bearing their namesakes. I know that I feel honored when I find arachnophiles anywhere, celebrities or not.