The Australian Museum in Sydney, Australia developed a spectacular blockbuster exhibit about spiders that was on display from 2016 through 2017. To improve the science content and increase the North American perspective in preparation for a North America tour, Dr. Rayor was asked to be consultant on the exhibit.

In Spring 2017, she worked in Australia while contributing to the spider exhibit and doing research on endemic huntsman spiders. She found it incredibly exciting to help behind the scenes and observe how professional museum exhibits are developed.

In 2018, Spiders: From Fear to Fascination came to North America where it attracted over 300,000 visitors at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and then the Montreal Science Centre. Dr. Rayor helped design the attractive live animal cages in the exhibit so that the spiders thrived but were also easy for museum visitors to see.

The Arachnophilia exhibit in Mann Library combines concepts, displays, and photographs that Dr. Linda Rayor has developed for her popular Spider Biology (Entom 3150) course and through her research on social spiders. Additionally, it showcases some of the work that Dr. Rayor and her team contributed to the fantastic From Fear to Fascination exhibit, including the painstaking work of collecting, preserving, and displaying delicate North American spiders.

Dr. Rayor and five dedicated students in her lab, Joe Giulian, Jacob Gorneau, Kristianna Lea, Leah Richardson, and Arabelle Orsicky, worked in collaboration with a select team of professionals including Lawrence Forcella, an artist and entomologist as well as owner of God of Insects in Maine, and diorama builder Alex Minott.

Lawrence worked with Linda Rayor to produce the life-like dioramas that house her specimens in Spiders: From Fear to Fascination and was the final preparer of the displays, helping with specimen preparation, fine-tuning the positions of some of the freeze-dried specimens, restoring the color of some specimens that had faded during the drying process, making repairs to damaged specimens, and artistically arranging and mounting the specimens in their displays and dioramas. Lawrence and Alex Minott also built three gorgeous dioramas of different habitats where the spiders were placed in life-like positions.

Simon Wheeler is a photographer for Cornell Photography and Cornell Brand Communications and took many of the excellent macro-photography images of the specimens seen in both From Fear to Fascination and Arachnophilia. Linda Rayor is also a photographer and took many of the outstanding images featured in Arachnophilia.

Arachnophilia: A Collaboration

Arachnophilia: A Passion for Spiders was the result of a close collaboration between designer/curator Jenny Leijonhufvud and Dr. Rayor. Jenny’s creativity, design, and vision helped transform Dr. Rayor’s work into a beautiful, informative, and appealing multimedia science exhibit. And they had fun doing it too!

I’ve been an avid museum goer since I was a young child. I became a scientist in large part because I was so influenced by my early experiences at (what is now) the Denver Museum of Science & Nature and the Denver Zoo. To be deeply involved in a professional spider exhibit and then create my own distinctly different spider exhibit has been incredibly fulfilling. I am terrifically proud of my talented students Joe Giulian, Jacob Gorneau, Kristianna Lea, Leah Richardson, and Arabelle Orsicky and Lawrence Forcella, who worked so closely with me to make exceptional displays. Spiders and teaching others about their wonders has been my passion, and there is a real sense of pride in sharing this exhibit.

--Linda S. Rayor