Spider Man

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."

He finds a group of baby brown-recluse spiders in the closet. "Not good," he says quietly. Baby spiders appearing in mid-October signify that the population has gone through a third reproductive cycle. The initial reproduction phase happens from March to May, and a second can unfold from July to September. October spiderlings are uncommon.

He makes his way around pieces of exercise equipment. An Evil Dead poster looms above him on the wall. "When you have brown-recluse problems, it's because something is wrong with the house, not because they are naturally there," he says, opening the doors to a dark furnace closet and peeking in without entering. "It's when you have the right prey around and you have the right environmental requirements.... I'm trying to make this house as inhospitable as possible."

Ultimately, Jamel Sandidge says, he doesn't kill brown recluses. "I turn your house into a brown-recluse killing machine."

As the owner and sole employee of Brown Recluse Solutions of McLouth, Kansas, Sandidge is used to hearing customers from all over the Kansas City area lose their common sense when explaining what they know — or think they know — about the dreaded brown recluse.

I heard if it bites you, you have to get to a hospital, quick.

If you put pine needles all over your house, they'll go away.

Mothballs repel them.

People tell me I should get a gecko to eat them.

Sandidge knows otherwise. In fact, he might know more than anyone in the country about brown-recluse behavior. And not because of his experience as an exterminator.

At 30, Sandidge holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Kansas, where he won numerous research and teaching accolades. He was the first KU student to win the highest awards for graduate students and graduate-student teachers. His research on social spiders — spiders that work together to capture prey — has provided answers to previously unaddressed questions about the brown recluse.

Lawrence and Kansas City proved to be good for his studies.

Rick Vetter, a noted brown-recluse researcher in the Department of Entomology at the University of California-Riverside, says Missouri and Kansas contain a massive population of brown recluses. Vetter says brown recluses live in the Midwest from Nebraska to Ohio and in the South through Texas and Georgia. In other words: "You're in deep there."

Vetter describes the spiders as nocturnal, synanthropic (meaning they live in the same environments as humans) organisms that are remarkably tolerant of one another, unlike other cannibalistic spider species. "They don't bite readily unless you roll over them," he says. "Most bites do nothing — I relate them to car wrecks: The horrific ones get all the attention." Still, expert consensus says bites can be harmful, depending on a person's reaction to the toxins.

For his master's and doctorate degrees, Sandidge studied brown-recluse populations established in residential neighborhoods.

He found pairs of various kinds of houses (small, large, new, old) all over Lawrence and Kansas City for a broad-scale study of brown-recluse activity in domestic settings. "A big part of it was using the research to dispel myths, like the one that says houses with certain kinds of roofs were more susceptible," he says. "It doesn't matter what kind of roof you have. Other factors are more important."

To find houses for his study, he sent out press releases and set up a Web site. Soon, homeowners began contacting him, wanting to be involved. He says many homeowners were under the impression that he'd rid their houses of brown-recluse infestation, though that was never his intent.

Instead, he combed all corners, inside and outside, observing the spiders' patterns and long-term activities and how home features such as age, size, landscaping, proximity to neighboring houses, and construction type affected population size.

"What I started to notice was that, whether they had pest control or not, it didn't seem to make a difference," he says. "That's when I started to go, 'Crap, pest control is supposed to get rid of them. Why doesn't it?'"

His interests began to change. "I guess one day I sat down and said, 'I could do that,' because no one else would."