Spider World Records: a resource for using organismal biology as a hook for science learning
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Zoology, Science and Medical Education
- Keywords
- Extremes, Misinformation, Urban legends, Araneae, Science education, Arachnophobia, Spider biology
- Copyright
- © 2017 Mammola et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Spider World Records: a resource for using organismal biology as a hook for science learning. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3028v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3028v1
Abstract
The public reputation of spiders is that they are deadly poisonous, brown and nondescript, and hairy and ugly. There are tales describing how they lay eggs in human skin, frequent toilet seats in airports, and crawl into your mouth when you are sleeping. Misinformation about spiders in the popular media and on the World Wide Web is rampant, leading to distorted perceptions and negative feelings about spiders. Despite these negative feelings, however, spiders offer intrigue and mystery and can be used to effectively engage even arachnophobic individuals. As such, we contend that spider biology can be a convincing hook for engaging people of all ages in science-related learning. Towards this end, and in order to provide an enthusiastic knowledge base for spider-related learning, we provide essential information about spider biology followed by a compilation of Spider World Records. We choose a world-record style format, as it is known to be an effective tool of engaging youth and adults alike. We group our records into the categories of Taxonomy, Morphology/Physiology and Ecology/Behaviour. We further reported on curiosities and clarify fake news about these underappreciated animals. Our contribution is specifically aimed to raise public awareness and attractiveness of spiders, meanwhile providing the first official knowledge base for world spider records.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.