Science: Spider Colony

Harvard provides a demanding enough environment for students who go there on purpose. But Loxosceles laeta, a poisonous South American spider that matriculated at Cambridge by accident, finds the university a friendly place indeed. Laetas have established a thriving colony in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and are multiplying rapidly.

Dr. Herbert Levi, the museum's associate curator of arachnology, and one of the world's leading spidermen, discovered the first laeta lurking in a cabinet of dead myriapods (millepedes and centipedes) in September 1960. Levi promptly identified the male spider, but he paid no further...

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