On the third floor of the CLCC building of the West campus, a small laboratory houses four research students, assistant professor and ecologist Chad Johnson and about 5,000 black widow spiders.

Johnson and the students are conducting research on a variety of spider behaviors, including cannibalism, growth, feeding and mating, and the reasons behind them.

Through the study of 26 different families of black widows, Johnson said the research team is analyzing behavioral traits as they apply to a spider’s genes.

“What we’ve been trying to figure out with this whole cannibalism thing is, is it just about how big your egg is or is it in your genes? Or do you just come from a family that’s nasty and cannibalistic?” he said.

“We’ve actually found big differences between families.”

Johnson said behaviors could be attributed to the amount of nutrients the spider receives in the egg. If that is not the sole determinant, genetic traits and even genetic personality are likely to play a role in the behavior of a spider, he said.

Johnson said there is an expectation that animals will behave in a predictable way in order to survive.

“You could ask, ‘Is that spider going to be aggressive,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, probably if it’s hungry, but if it’s stuffed it won’t be as aggressive,’ or that’s what you’d expect because spiders are just eating robots right?” Johnson said. “But in fact, spiders have genes and environments just like us so there’s not really any reason to believe that they wouldn’t have some developed disposition.”

The research team has been conducting experiments in order to examine the correlation between cannibalistic behaviors, the animal’s disposition and how the spider acts in the presence of a predator.

Johnson said he and the students were observing spiders over the course of their lifetimes to see if some spiders were consistently more or less aggressive when it came to feeding, mating and predators.

Lindsay Miles, a biology graduate student, has worked in the spider lab with Johnson since being an undergraduate student last year.

Miles said that further study of spiders might help to ease people’s fear of the creatures, like it did for her.

“Until you know more about them, they are scary,” Miles said, “but through time and practice, you release your fear because you know you’re being safe enough to not get bit.”

The research specific to the personalities, or “behavioral syndromes” of the spiders may also help debunk the scary stereotype spiders have, she said.

“Maybe if we find some with super shy behaviors, it’ll ease the fear,” Miles said. “The general population of spiders is more afraid of you than you are of them. They’re not going to come attack you. They’ll probably run and hide.”

Johnson said most people have a fear of spiders not because they’re dangerous, but because many people aren’t knowledgeable about spiders and their behaviors.

“I started out scared of spiders just like everybody else, but given enough time you can figure out what they are going to do,” Johnson said.

“The fear goes away after a while once you get to know the animals and get to know how they make their living and how they’ll react, what would be dumb to do and would not be dumb, what you can do with them.”

Stephen Des Georges, director of public relations and marketing for the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, said many students were initially scared to be working with the spiders.

“You look at spiders and they’re creepy, they’ve got these eight legs, and they’re off hiding in the dark somewhere,” he said.

Des Georges said labs like these provide students with the unique opportunity of going through the entire research process from start to finish as undergraduate students.

“This research is really important because students get to go through the entire process of research,” he said. “Spiders just happen to be the tool.”

This research was also helpful in determining ways to keep black widows at a safe distance in the urban environment they share with humans, Johnson said.

“People don’t have a lot of compassion [for black widows],” Johnson said. “They spend their lives trying to keep them out of their backyard.”

Johnson said unlike many other desert species, black widows seem to like living in the urban environment created by humans because it provides them with more prey in the form of crickets, which gravitate toward green lawns, and roaches.

“We like to joke that they live on kind of a junk-food diet in the urban environment,” Johnson said.

Reach the reporter at michelle.parks@asu.edu.