Piotr Naskrecki, the entomologist who blogged about discovering a “puppy-sized” Goliath birdeater spider in the rainforest of Guyana, appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition on Saturday to discuss the fallout from his blog post, which he has received hate mail and death threats over. My first reaction to hearing that was, really? Death threats? Sure, that picture of the giant spider ruined my day for like five whole minutes but I’m not gong to shoot the messenger over it.
But no, people are upset because Naskrecki captured, euthanized, and preserved the spider, which is now on display at the Center for the Study of Biological Diversity at the University of Guyana so that it can be studied by future scientists. Naskrecki told Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon:
I have received quite a bit of negative reactions to the fact that we scientists have to collect specimens occasionally. I would like to emphasize that we never do it lightly and this is probably the most unpleasant part of our job. But unfortunately, there’s really no other way to look inside of an organism. We need to dissect things to see how their internal organ works. The easiest way to get the DNA is to grind the muscle of an organism. But in addition to that, we collect specimens not knowing what they will be used for. The museum where I work has 21 million specimens collected over the last 200 or 300 years, and they’re still being studied. And we are still answering questions that would have been inconceivable when the specimens were first collected.
Jesus. People need to relax. It makes me feel a little bit safer knowing that a “puppy-sized” spider is off the streets . . . err, rainforest of Guyana where it wasn’t hurting anyone except for whatever birds and small mammals were unfortunate enough to cross its path. BUT STILL. The knowledge that one less puppy-sized spider exists in the world is good enough for me. We should be giving this guy a medal, not threatening his life.
Naskrecki has updated his original blog post, which was getting 120,000 unique visits per day and now reads “Involuntary Bioslaughter and Why a Spider is Dead” at the top before delving into the original content, if you’d like to read his full explanation.
(Via i09)