SELINSGROVE, Pa. — Halloween is celebrated all year long in one part of Snyder County. There are nearly 2,000 spiders inside Susquehanna University's Natural Sciences Center.
"We have to collect them from the field. There's no store you can buy these spiders from. We collect them, bring them in, and set them in containers. Typically, they eat five to 12 crickets per week," said Matt Persons, a biology professor at Susquehanna University.
That's around 25,000 crickets per week.
Persons researches spider behavior, which requires a lot of spiders. Currently, Persons is researching the effects pesticides have on spiders.
"There's a lot of sub-lethal effects that can happen too. It can impair their ability to move around. It can impair prey capture, which affects their feeding rates, their growth rates. It can affect reproduction."
The research not only helps spiders; it helps students too.
"They do this as part of their capstone research. So seniors will spend either a semester or a year doing research with a faculty member," Persons said.
Joseph McKee is a biology major at Susquehanna. As part of his research, he has caught hundreds of spiders.
"I never thought I would be working with spiders for any amount of time, let alone a year," McKee said. "It's actually nice to get out of my comfort zone a little bit to see the other side of the animal spectrum."
For most of us, spooky season is over at the end of this month, but in this lab, Halloween continues all year round.
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