8-Leg Education: A Night with Spiders

This is an interactive hands-on activity that will teach kids about spider biology, the adaptations spiders have to help them be active and thrive during the night, and the importance of their conservation. At the start of the event, I will talk about basic spider biology and some of the things we will be seeing. I will have live spiders (tarantulas) for the attendees to look at and even handle (if they would like to). After a brief introduction, the event takes kids on a night-walk to find and catch wolf spiders. In order to find wolf spiders we use a headlamp that illuminates the spider’s eyes because of the presence of a light-reflecting surface at the back of their eye, a tapetum, resulting in an eye-shine. Kids of all ages can see this eye-shine, find the spider, and collect them using a collecting vial provided to them by me (they can keep this vial after the activity is done). All participants will be encouraged to bring their own flashlight or headlamp; however, I will have extra headlamps available. These events are always catch and release. The event usually lasts ~ 2 hours, including about 1 hour before dark, and 1 hour of collecting afterwards.