The scariest place in Pennsylvania isn't Field of Screams, Jason's Woods or the haunted fields of Gettysburg.
If you're an arachnophobe, it's Harrisburg University. Specifically one of the science labs on the 12th floor, because that is the home of 87 spiders - and they're pretty big.
The spiders - Agelenopsis Pennsylvanica - live their day-to-day life in little plastic containers, in which they've spun webs and eaten numerous crickets. They're being watched to see if they'll lay egg sacs and to see how feisty they are. The feistiest are being bred with each other and the meek are mating with each other. It's all part of a longterm experiment in spider husbandry being conducted by Dr. Robert Furey and his class.
While they are breeding the spiders, the group is conducting another experiment, one centered around cannibalism.
When each egg sac hatches and releases the hundreds of slumbering baby spiders within, the class will be looking to see if the spiders recognize their siblings - or if they just look at them as opponents for resources. Will the spiders eat their brothers and sisters? Or will they be able to co-exist peacefully? Those are the answers Furey wants to get.
The spiders were all caught by Furey and his students.
"You actually kind of trick them," Furey said, describing how the students tickle the traps that the spiders have created, getting them to come out of their hiding places to investigate.
The 87 spiders that the students caught are not being used in the cannibalism experiment directly, however. "We know that if we put these spiders in the same containers and don't give them the opportunity to escape, somebody is going to die," Furey explained. "We know that. There's no experiment there."
They will be used to breed however. "We want to hatch the eggs and when the spiders are first born we're going to put them under three different conditions where groups of spiders will be entirely from the same egg sac, so they're all brothers and sisters, and a sort of 50/50 mix between two egg sacs and then another mix where every single individual comes from a differnet egg sac," Furey said. "We'll look at cannibalism rates there to see if they can recognize their brothers and sisters."
"We are sort of hoping that they will not be eating each other when they first come out," he said.
But what happens to the spiders when the experiment is over? Mass genocide?
"No, no, we would not do that. There are always experiments that you can do. There are always students looking for projects..." Furey said. "These animals will be available for other students to work on. If nobody has a project in mind then they'll be fed and watered and kept through the winter as long as we can and if they're around next spring then we'll let them go."