Spider Man

It's just after 8 on a chilly autumn morning. Jamel Sandidge sits at the kitchen table of a two-story house in a cozy neighborhood north of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Remnants of this morning's breakfast clutter the counters. A child and a pet have scattered toys throughout the adjacent living room. The homeowner — we'll call him Mr. Jones — sits on a stool at the kitchen table, cradling a coffee cup.

We're calling the homeowner Jones because we've agreed not to reveal the identity of Sandidge's client, whose home has been invaded by brown-recluse spiders.

"They find ways to get in eventually," San­didge says as he shuffles through the load of paperwork he has deemed necessary for this routine household treatment. "They grow pretty slowly. A typical brood — they can mate with their family members, so breeding can be easy."

Jones nods his head as Sandidge hands him information about the infamous arachnid. Jones and his wife bought this house over the summer.

"It's not very easy for them to bite you," Sandidge says. Humans have tough skin. Still, the Jones family should be careful. "Soft body tissue, like armpits, is susceptible." He goes on. "Their webs are unlike any on Earth. The webbing is perfectly flat, making it hard to see, and takes a long time to build up. Their life span in the lab is two years. It's generally the same outside because two to four months of the year, they don't move at all."

"Have you ever been bit?" Jones asks.

"No."

"Amazing," Jones says, as if Sandidge has cheated death.

Sandidge smiles. "I've had some moments when one goes down the shirt and I'm not so sure for a couple of days. But, in general, I don't think I've been bitten. It happens in that period when you become complacent and you don't take precautions. I don't get like that. I can pick them up with my hand, but I'm not going to stick my head up in the attic without looking first — and that's when it happens."

New to the discussion, Mrs. Jones makes sure the whole room can hear her shudder at the thought of holding a brown recluse. "That creeps me out," she says.

Sandidge continues with the spiel. The flipping of papers has been replaced by his prodding of a PDA with its stylus.

"They eat dead things. They eat live things. They eat each other. So you have to get rid of all of them before we fully are able to cut off their food supply. After the numbers go down, you'll start to see other spiders fill that same niche. You'll also see more insects, like crickets."

The conversation moves on to the ways that Sandidge plans to rescue this house. "I go to old clients' houses when they call me, but I know I'm not going to find even one," he says.

Sandidge leads the young couple down the stairs into the basement and prepares to treat the trouble spots.

"So what are you putting down there?" Jones asks as Sandidge fills his application tool with white powder.

"This is a dusting mixture made up of a few compounds I'll tell you about later," he says, possibly careful of announcing his recipe with a reporter around. "I try to use all natural products because things don't become immune to natural products. Independently, all these things will kill a recluse, though at different speeds. All combined together, they take 10 minutes to kill one."

He points to brown-recluse exoskeletons he finds behind insulation of an unfinished room. His headlamp lights dark corners. Bright-pink insulation contrasts with the dingy gray concrete.

"How long can they go between meals?" Mrs. Jones asks, staring intently into the dark space.

"They can go as much as 10 months," Sandidge says as he casually scoops a live sample from the wall into a vial. "An adult male — it's about as big as they get."

Mrs. Jones notices one scurrying across the floor. "They don't move that slowly," she says. "Everyone was telling me, 'If they're slow, it's them.'"

Sandidge laughs. "It's kind of the opposite. If they move fast, it's them. It's the fight-or-flight. If they feel like they can't get away, they'll stay still."

The group moves into a storage room full of more toys. "Get rid of this," Sandidge says, pointing to a wicker basket on a shelf. "They love those things. They occupy the thin slots." After his run-through of the basement, he puts to work the device that he uses to spread killing dust throughout suspect areas: a tool he developed after years of study.

He examines every angle of a room before deciding what and where to dust. The pish-pish-pish sound of the pump signals that something has entered his sights. "Seeing seven or eight already, there's a problem," he concludes early. "The first time I was here, I collected five or six. They said they've seen or killed 30 or so. We've seen about 20 exoskeletons here already today, so we're up to about 70 spiders already. So it's beyond your average population."