 Okay, so I did a study of arachnophobic entomologists and again, looking at the diversity of insects, different morphologies, butterflies, yellow jackets, ladybugs, walking sticks, grasshoppers, bedbugs, you would think that an entomologist would just take a spider or take an insect, add two legs to it, come up with a spider and treat it just the same as an insect. But yet, people who work within the insects 40 hours a week still treat spiders differently. So I did a study of arachnophobic entomologists. The article was published in American entomologists and these people had to meet three criteria, consider themselves to be entomologists, work with live insects and have negative feelings towards spiders, either from mild disgust to full-blown arachnophobia. I use the fear of spider's questionnaire, which is a standard psychology questionnaire used to riddle out arachnophobia in people. It consists of 18 statements and this was the score of the statement from 0 to 7, whether you agree or disagree with the statement and to what extent. The score that you receive is the sum of the statements, so 18 times 7 is 126, which is the maximum score and scores above 80 are considered clinical arachnophobia. 41 respondents were qualified for the study and now you can see that most of the people had very low scores, meaning they just had mild disgust, but there were several arachnologists or entomologists who were in the clinical arachnophobia range. And to the one question, spiders is one of my greatest fears, five entomologists scored the highest score and there were scores of five and six as well. Now the things that the entomologists didn't like about spiders is the same thing that the general public doesn't like about spiders, morphologically they have many legs and they're hairy and they're dark. Behaviorally the way they move, they don't expect to show up or they show up unexpectedly, they run fast, they're silent, which actually is the same thing that goes on with lots of insects and yet they divide the insects and spiders in two different groups. Medical, the fact that they bite, I thought it was interesting that the fact that they might be dangerous was more important than they were more dangerous and from the aesthetic standpoint they thought they're ugly and disgusting and if you look at some insects they're pretty disgusting and ugly as well. Luckily no one took filthy as a situation where they would consider spiders to be vectors of bacteria. To highlight some of the more amusing respondents, the first entomologist scored 66 on the scale and her older sister used to torment her but when she was a single-digit age child the sister would grab spiders in a tissue and crush them and then chase her sister around the house. She's a collection manager in a museum where she's in charge of insects and the spider collection. So she manages the spider collection. Dead spiders are okay but live spiders are not and she's just walking into the spider collection she gets the heebie-jeebies and just filling out the survey creeped her out. The next entomologist had a score that was clinically arachnophobic range. She works with maggots and she said she'd rather scoop up a handful of maggots with a gloved hand than to deal with a live spider and her rationale for this was the fact that maggots don't sneak up on you and put jump in your hair. The third entomologist has a lower score but he has had arachnophobia his entire life. When he was a 40 year old he drove around with paper towels in the front seat of the car in case the spider showed up on the windshield. The yellow sack spider did show up on the windshield so he reached for his trusty paper towel roll and grabbed the paper towel and the spider disappeared by the time he got his towel ready. So the spider was gone and then in a moment of utter sheer terror the spider reappeared crawling on his face and up his nostril. He snorted with full force to dislodge the spider and pulled over without crashing. He then spent an hour looking for the spider in that van and concluded the comments with this was not a good day. So even though entomologists work with spider, work with insects their entire life 40 hours a week for many years they still treat spiders differently and so for these entomologists two more legs make the big difference.