Shir­van Williams

Most two-year-olds run away from spi­ders, but Jo-Anne Ni­na Sewlal was play­ing with them at that age. Now an in­struc­tor in zo­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine, she's sought af­ter by in­ter­na­tion­al Web sites to share her ex­per­tise in the field of arach­nol­o­gy.

Sewlal has been fea­tured on the pop­u­lar site live­science.com in re­cent months, as she shared her knowl­edge on Black Wid­ow spi­ders for an ar­ti­cle on types of spi­ders and spi­der facts, pub­lished on No­vem­ber 4.

Last year, Sewlal dis­cov­ered five new species of spi­ders in Trinidad which she in­tends to doc­u­ment. With­out flinch­ing, she shared a sto­ry, smil­ing, about a room she stayed in once where there were taran­tu­las crawl­ing on the ceil­ing. She hasn't named the five new spi­ders which she dis­cov­ered through­out the is­land and did not want to re­veal ex­act­ly where they were found while re­search­ing for her the­sis, while pur­su­ing her doc­tor­ate. She be­lieves the dis­cov­ery is im­por­tant be­cause it could help boost T&T's eco-tourism mar­ket for na­ture lovers. Sewlal usu­al­ly goes in­to deeply-forest­ed ar­eas to find the spi­ders for her re­search.

Most of the spi­ders in the East­ern Caribbean have not yet been doc­u­ment­ed, but through her work, she hopes many peo­ple through­out the Caribbean will soon be able to iden­ti­fy the var­i­ous species and know which ones are poi­so­nous and which ones are not. She has al­ready vis­it­ed St Kitts, Nevis, St Lu­cia, An­guil­la, Grena­da, Haiti, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, St Vin­cent and Do­mini­ca.

Her love of spi­ders be­gan as a tod­dler when she was stay­ing with her grand­moth­er in Point Fortin. She was mes­merised by a house spi­der that was com­ing down from the roof on a silk thread.

"My grand­moth­er was fear­less with an­i­mals. She was clean­ing one day and a spi­der dropped down on a dragline of silk, so I was look­ing at it and she went on to ex­plain that if you touch it, it would go back up and if you give it a lit­tle time it would come back down. So she left me play­ing with it and it was ba­si­cal­ly like an au­to­mat­ic yo-yo," she said dur­ing an in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian at the De­part­ment of Life Sci­ences.

Sewlal would for­get her fas­ci­na­tion with the crea­tures for a while when she at­tend­ed sec­ondary school at Princes Town West Sec­ondary. How­ev­er that first in­ter­ac­tion at her grand­moth­er's house would still in­spire her to study zo­ol­o­gy and last year, she grad­u­at­ed with a PhD. She de­cid­ed to spe­cialise in arach­nids in the East­ern Caribbean af­ter she met now-re­tired pro­fes­sor of en­to­mol­o­gy Dr Christo­pher Starr.

"UWI had just fin­ished host­ing the Amer­i­can Arach­no­log­i­cal So­ci­ety meet­ing. That was the first time it was held out­side of Amer­i­ca and the host, Prof Starr, came with a poster...a spi­der with a ras­ta cap. He was ex­plain­ing about spi­ders and that there's no­body do­ing work on spi­ders and their eco­log­i­cal im­por­tance."

Sewlal ini­tial­ly be­gan to study birds, but soon re­alised she did not have the same en­thu­si­asm for them, es­pe­cial­ly af­ter see­ing the scratch­es that her su­per­vi­sor had to en­dure when try­ing to trap them for re­search.

While go­ing through her op­tions she no­ticed that the spi­der sec­tion in the man­u­al she had to choose from was very small and her love of the crea­tures helped her to ce­ment the de­ci­sion.

"The spi­der sec­tion was so small and I said it's bet­ter that I do some­thing I love, that I can con­tribute to and make that chap­ter a lot thick­er," she laughed.

Sewlal ad­mit­ted that a lot of peo­ple are shocked by what she does for a liv­ing but said af­ter she teach­es them about spi­ders they are usu­al­ly hap­py be­cause she is able to help them un­der­stand which spi­ders pose a threat to hu­man health. She is al­so able to help peo­ple un­der­stand that spi­ders are not scary and added that peo­ple just need to un­der­stand how spi­ders think.

There are two poi­so­nous types of spi­ders in T&T, the Brown Wid­ow (La­trodec­tus geo­met­ri­cus) and the Sac spi­der (mi­turgi­dae), but she ex­plained that it is very un­like­ly that a healthy adult would die from their bite: all spi­ders bite but they use dif­fer­ent types of ven­om and most of them have just enough to kill small prey like cock­roach­es.

This coun­try may not have any se­ri­ous­ly dead­ly spi­ders, but this is why we need to pro­tect our bor­ders es­pe­cial­ly when im­port­ing things like fruits and veg­eta­bles, as new species could be in­tro­duced if there are not prop­er quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties, she said. Sewlal says there are at least 53 spi­der fam­i­lies in T&T and about eight more could be dis­cov­ered, based on those found in Venezuela.

Sewlal al­so finds time to ed­u­cate peo­ple about bio­di­ver­si­ty through­out the Caribbean.

"One of my oth­er pas­sions is pub­lic aware­ness, so when I go to the oth­er is­lands I al­ways tried to get an in­ter­view done by the mass me­dia, to let them know first of all that I'm not nuts, be­cause they will see me with a net, and what I am do­ing and how it is go­ing to con­tribute to their bio­di­ver­si­ty. So I just use what­ev­er I can to help ed­u­cate peo­ple," she said. She al­so ed­its the En­vi­ron­ment To­ba­go Newslet­ter.

Sewlal just can­not ex­plain her love of spi­ders and why she is so com­fort­able with them but vows she will nev­er stop learn­ing about them.