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B.C. has 781 known spider species, but Claudia Copley of the Royal BC Museum said the survey will likely push that to 1,000 over the next few years.

Few people have been bitten by more spiders than Claudia Copley, the head of a team of researchers that in the past eight years has recorded 125 new spider species in British Columbia.

To Ms. Copley, the entomology collections manager for the Royal BC Museum, those bites are just part of the cost of advancing science.

"We flip thousands and thousands of rocks. … We use an aspirator to suck [the spiders] up and collect them into a vial," she said of the process involved in the museum's ongoing biodiversity project.

During the spider survey, Ms. Copley routinely handles the arachnids.

"I've been bitten many times," she said. "When you handle a spider and you are holding it because you don't want it to get away … they will bite you then."

Despite those bites, Ms. Copley says spiders are timid creatures that people need not fear, even when they encounter something as intimidating as a common giant house spider.

"They are big and they can bite, but they don't, because they are not aggressive," she said. "They are not going to bite you in your bed or anything crazy like that."

B.C. has 781 known spider species, but Ms. Copley said the survey will likely push that to 1,000 over the next few years.

"We are recording new records for B.C., new records for Canada and sometimes undescribed species [globally]," she said.

Although the researchers are looking in remote areas, including high on mountain slopes, spiders are also found in office buildings and apartment towers.

"I think you are always within five feet [of one]," she said.

On Thursday, the Royal BC Museum issued a press release on spiders, in which Ms. Copley tried to dispel some of the myths, including the one about fall being "spider season."

Yes, she said, many more spiders do appear to be around in September, but that is only because they have become more visible outside and more spiders are showing up indoors.

"This is the time of year when people really notice them, but you have spiders year-round," she said. "A lot of spiders are on an annual life cycle. They started out really tiny in the spring and people didn't really notice them. But this time of year they are mature. So, especially things like the orb weaving spider, which make the big bicycle wheel webs, those species are huge by this time of year."

Ms. Copley said more spiders are also seen indoors in the fall because males are roaming widely in search of mates.

"It's really a tragic love story," she said, noting that wandering spiders often get squashed by the horrified humans they encounter. "They are attempting to find a mate and they end up in the wrong place."

She said the easiest way to dispose of a spider "is to put a glass over it, slide a card stock underneath, then just pop it outside. Put him back where he would like to find his mate."

If you do get bitten, the only time to be concerned is if it is a black widow, a species in B.C. found in the Okanagan and Thompson regions and along the southeast coast of Vancouver Island.

Even the giant house spider, which can grow to the size of a human palm, is not dangerous, she stresses.

"Their bite doesn't have venom that's harmful for us," she said.

Ms. Copley knows from experience. None of the countless bites she has received has made her sick or caused infection.

And she said people who wake in their beds to find a mysterious bite mark on them are almost certainly mistaken if they blame it on a spider.

"It's probably a flea. … Spiders get blamed for an awful lot, but I think they are almost all innocent of all charges," she said.

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