Maydianne andrade biography of barack

Poisonous spiders, sexual cannibalism, adaptive suicide—biologist Maydianne Andrade jokes that her research makes for good cocktail party conversations. It all seems slightly lurid and tends to intrigue even people who think they aren't interested in science.

Yet what Andrade studies, at the core, are striking cases in evolution. In this interview, Andrade talks about spending months on end in the Australian outback peering into the nocturnal lives of redback spiders (one of about 20 species in the "black widow" genus, Latrodectus), what it's like to raise thousands of tiny spiderlings in her lab at the University of Toronto, and more.

Fear not

NOVA: Were you afraid of spiders when you were a kid?

Maydianne Andrade: I was afraid of spiders.

When I was really young, my two brothers and I were in the basement watching TV, and a fairly small—and, I realize now, completely harmless—spider crawled out into the middle of the living room floor, an