Spider Man
It’s just after 8 on a chilly autumn morning. Jamel Sandidge sits at the kitchen table of a two-story house in a cozy neighborhood north of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Remnants of this morning’s breakfast clutter the counters. A child and a pet have scattered toys throughout the adjacent living room. The homeowner — we’ll call him Mr. Jones — sits on a stool at the kitchen table, cradling a coffee cup.
We’re calling the homeowner Jones because we’ve agreed not to reveal the identity of Sandidge’s client, whose home has been invaded by brown-recluse spiders.
“They find ways to get in eventually,” Sandidge says as he shuffles through the load of paperwork he has deemed necessary for this routine household treatment. “They grow pretty slowly. A typical brood — they can mate with their family members, so breeding can be easy.”
Jones nods his head as Sandidge hands him information about the infamous arachnid. Jones and his wife bought this house over the summer.
“It’s not very easy for them to bite you,” Sandidge says. Humans have tough skin. Still, the Jones family should be careful. “Soft body tissue, like armpits, is susceptible.” He goes on. “Their webs are unlike any on Earth. The webbing is perfectly flat, making it hard to see, and takes a long time to build up. Their life span in the lab is two years. It’s generally the same outside because two to four months of the year, they don’t move at all.”
“Have you ever been bit?” Jones asks.
“No.”
“Amazing,” Jones says, as if Sandidge has cheated death.
Sandidge smiles. “I’ve had some moments when one goes down the shirt and I’m not so sure for a couple of days. But, in general, I don’t think I’ve been bitten. It happens in that period when you become complacent and you don’t take precautions. I don’t get like that. I can pick them up with my hand, but I’m not going to stick my head up in the attic without looking first — and that’s when it happens.”
New to the discussion, Mrs. Jones makes sure the whole room can hear her shudder at the thought of holding a brown recluse. “That creeps me out,” she says.
Sandidge continues with the spiel. The flipping of papers has been replaced by his prodding of a PDA with its stylus.
“They eat dead things. They eat live things. They eat each other. So you have to get rid of all of them before we fully are able to cut off their food supply. After the numbers go down, you’ll start to see other spiders fill that same niche. You’ll also see more insects, like crickets.”
The conversation moves on to the ways that Sandidge plans to rescue this house. “I go to old clients’ houses when they call me, but I know I’m not going to find even one,” he says.
Sandidge leads the young couple down the stairs into the basement and prepares to treat the trouble spots.
“So what are you putting down there?” Jones asks as Sandidge fills his application tool with white powder.
“This is a dusting mixture made up of a few compounds I’ll tell you about later,” he says, possibly careful of announcing his recipe with a reporter around. “I try to use all natural products because things don’t become immune to natural products. Independently, all these things will kill a recluse, though at different speeds. All combined together, they take 10 minutes to kill one.”
He points to brown-recluse exoskeletons he finds behind insulation of an unfinished room. His headlamp lights dark corners. Bright-pink insulation contrasts with the dingy gray concrete.
“How long can they go between meals?” Mrs. Jones asks, staring intently into the dark space.
“They can go as much as 10 months,” Sandidge says as he casually scoops a live sample from the wall into a vial. “An adult male — it’s about as big as they get.”
Mrs. Jones notices one scurrying across the floor. “They don’t move that slowly,” she says. “Everyone was telling me, ‘If they’re slow, it’s them.'”
Sandidge laughs. “It’s kind of the opposite. If they move fast, it’s them. It’s the fight-or-flight. If they feel like they can’t get away, they’ll stay still.”
The group moves into a storage room full of more toys. “Get rid of this,” Sandidge says, pointing to a wicker basket on a shelf. “They love those things. They occupy the thin slots.” After his run-through of the basement, he puts to work the device that he uses to spread killing dust throughout suspect areas: a tool he developed after years of study.
He examines every angle of a room before deciding what and where to dust. The pish-pish-pish sound of the pump signals that something has entered his sights. “Seeing seven or eight already, there’s a problem,” he concludes early. “The first time I was here, I collected five or six. They said they’ve seen or killed 30 or so. We’ve seen about 20 exoskeletons here already today, so we’re up to about 70 spiders already. So it’s beyond your average population.”
He finds a group of baby brown-recluse spiders in the closet. “Not good,” he says quietly. Baby spiders appearing in mid-October signify that the population has gone through a third reproductive cycle. The initial reproduction phase happens from March to May, and a second can unfold from July to September. October spiderlings are uncommon.
He makes his way around pieces of exercise equipment. An Evil Dead poster looms above him on the wall. “When you have brown-recluse problems, it’s because something is wrong with the house, not because they are naturally there,” he says, opening the doors to a dark furnace closet and peeking in without entering. “It’s when you have the right prey around and you have the right environmental requirements…. I’m trying to make this house as inhospitable as possible.”
Ultimately, Jamel Sandidge says, he doesn’t kill brown recluses. “I turn your house into a brown-recluse killing machine.”
As the owner and sole employee of Brown Recluse Solutions of McLouth, Kansas, Sandidge is used to hearing customers from all over the Kansas City area lose their common sense when explaining what they know — or think they know — about the dreaded brown recluse.
I heard if it bites you, you have to get to a hospital, quick.
If you put pine needles all over your house, they’ll go away.
Mothballs repel them.
People tell me I should get a gecko to eat them.
Sandidge knows otherwise. In fact, he might know more than anyone in the country about brown-recluse behavior. And not because of his experience as an exterminator.
At 30, Sandidge holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Kansas, where he won numerous research and teaching accolades. He was the first KU student to win the highest awards for graduate students and graduate-student teachers. His research on social spiders — spiders that work together to capture prey — has provided answers to previously unaddressed questions about the brown recluse.
Lawrence and Kansas City proved to be good for his studies.
Rick Vetter, a noted brown-recluse researcher in the Department of Entomology at the University of California-Riverside, says Missouri and Kansas contain a massive population of brown recluses. Vetter says brown recluses live in the Midwest from Nebraska to Ohio and in the South through Texas and Georgia. In other words: “You’re in deep there.”
Vetter describes the spiders as nocturnal, synanthropic (meaning they live in the same environments as humans) organisms that are remarkably tolerant of one another, unlike other cannibalistic spider species. “They don’t bite readily unless you roll over them,” he says. “Most bites do nothing — I relate them to car wrecks: The horrific ones get all the attention.” Still, expert consensus says bites can be harmful, depending on a person’s reaction to the toxins.
For his master’s and doctorate degrees, Sandidge studied brown-recluse populations established in residential neighborhoods.
He found pairs of various kinds of houses (small, large, new, old) all over Lawrence and Kansas City for a broad-scale study of brown-recluse activity in domestic settings. “A big part of it was using the research to dispel myths, like the one that says houses with certain kinds of roofs were more susceptible,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what kind of roof you have. Other factors are more important.”
To find houses for his study, he sent out press releases and set up a Web site. Soon, homeowners began contacting him, wanting to be involved. He says many homeowners were under the impression that he’d rid their houses of brown-recluse infestation, though that was never his intent.
Instead, he combed all corners, inside and outside, observing the spiders’ patterns and long-term activities and how home features such as age, size, landscaping, proximity to neighboring houses, and construction type affected population size.
“What I started to notice was that, whether they had pest control or not, it didn’t seem to make a difference,” he says. “That’s when I started to go, ‘Crap, pest control is supposed to get rid of them. Why doesn’t it?'”
His interests began to change. “I guess one day I sat down and said, ‘I could do that,’ because no one else would.”
His methods today include taking samples from the homes and businesses he treats and testing various compound mixtures, most notably botanical agents that have repellent and killing capabilities, such as pyrethrum (a toxin that comes from chrysanthemums), to discover what would effectively kill every sector (young, old, male, female) of a population. Sandidge says using natural products is one of the things that sets him apart from his competitors. So do many of his theories: Insecticides poisonous to humans aren’t necessary to control a population; brown recluses are more scavengers than predators; infestations in houses aren’t always the fault of human error; brown recluses don’t bite aggressively but rather when they’re pressed; the widely used traps, or glue boards, that adhere a spider to a strip of paper or cardboard should be used as a monitoring tool for research, not as an eradication tool.
Now, two years into his new life as an exterminator, he dismisses his competitors as using a method he describes as “There’s one — spray!”
“I do consulting for larger firms across the U.S.A.,” Sandidge says. Criticized by some exterminators as a self-promoter, Sandidge has nevertheless secured gigs with firms such as the Evansville, Indiana-based Action Pest Control, a major operation in the Ohio River Valley.
Kent Foley, the owner of Arrest-a-Pest in Wichita, called on Sandidge after hearing him speak at an annual state-recertification convention.
“We were doing all the same things everyone else was doing — spraying floorboards, putting glue boards down — limited methods, in my opinion,” Foley says. “We’ve seen phenomenal results since his training.”
Foley’s trucks now boast that his is the only Wichita pest-control business “Certified as brown recluse specialists by Dr. Jamel Sandidge.”
But not everyone buys Sandidge’s claims or the manner in which he trumpets them.
Jeff Holper is the owner of Animal and Insect Solutions in St. Louis and a former president of the Missouri Pest Management Association.
The 22-year veteran of the pest-control industry listened to Sandidge speak during a seminar at Purdue University.
“He said, ‘I’m the expert. This is what I know. If you think anything different, you’re wrong.’ I was offended,” Holper says.
“Because he’s got all the crap behind his name,” he says of Sandidge’s degrees, “people think he’s a great expert. Then he can charge a lot more than it’s worth.”
One academic, an entomologist who is familiar with Sandidge’s work but requested anonymity to avoid angering his former colleague, cautions that Sandidge’s work can’t be considered conclusive until there’s more research. “He infers from his laboratory experiments that spraying insecticide will increase brown-recluse population in homes. But no one has done any critical, real-world experiments to prove this actually happens. His notions are controversial. He might be right and will change how brown-recluse pest control is done. But he also might be wrong. The body of research on the subject is insufficient.”
“It’s not rocket science,” Sandidge counters. If he notices that a certain population isn’t reacting to the dusting mixture, he simply adjusts. “But that’s the part of the equation that most people don’t understand.”
Here’s how it started. One day when Sandidge was in elementary school, he took a black widow to class in a glass jar.
“I remember the librarian took it from me and said I couldn’t have it in school. I really didn’t know why. I understood it was poisonous, but I didn’t really know anything about it.”
Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Madison Heights, Virginia, across the James River from Lynchburg, Sandidge says he was a nerdy kid. “I was into robotics and stuff. I got good grades but never had to try too hard at it.”
He describes his family — father, mother, two older siblings, himself — as middle class. “It was a smallish town … we had a creek and woods behind our house.”
He always harassed the local bug population but never really knew why.
The incident with the black widow and the librarian triggered his curiosity; he claims to have checked out every book about spiders from every library in the area.
Less nerdy by the time he got to high school, he ran track and played football. “I still have records for the shot put and discus,” he says. “I was always breaking my own records. I always did things technically perfect because I wasn’t a big guy.” He says he had offers to play football at a handful of Division II colleges, but his focus wasn’t on sports. His straight-A grade-point average, multiple college credits and presidency of the local Vocational Industrial Club of America — “I’ve been president of over 20 clubs in my life,” he says — propelled him toward academia.
He started at Virginia Tech as an engineering major, but his hatred for the subject and general misery nearly caused him to quit school.
“When you go to college, everybody tells you what you should do because it might make a lot of money, not to do what you’re good at or what you like.” One day, he was browsing a handout that detailed the various research projects going on at the school, and he noted the spider studies of Brent Opell, a biology professor at Virginia Tech. He went to visit Opell, and after a four-hour discussion with the professor, he became a worker in Opell’s lab and switched his major to molecular biology.
“Jamel was kind of quiet at first,” Opell recalls. “If you’ve talked with him, you might not believe that now.”
Opell recognized his student’s potential and put Sandidge on a project involving the relationship between the spider cerebellum and the capture thread it makes. “He did take on things that no one had looked into,” Opell says. “Brown recluses have been around for so long, and people have been aware of their problems and biology, but it’s surprising how much he found out about their relationships and dispersal — a lot of basic biological questions you might have thought people had figured out years ago.”
Sandidge’s interest in spiders’ dispersal, population characteristics, genetic structure and social behavior led him to KU for a master’s degree. “I wanted to combine my degree in molecular biology with spiders,” he says.
One of the only scientists doing this kind of research was Deborah Smith, an entomology professor at KU. When he realized that few people knew about brown-recluse populations in Kansas — and as he started to believe that everything published on the matter so far was “extremely repetitious” — he decided to stay in Lawrence for his doctorate.
Smith, who became Sandidge’s adviser at KU, says his study of brown recluses in urban environments, an area previously untapped by researchers, was groundbreaking. “It’s almost a mystery to me why it wasn’t done before,” she says. “The idea that they have strong scavenging habits was novel. No one had done that.”
The significance of that idea, she says, was that the sedentary brown recluse might not actively search for a supply of live insects. Therefore, spraying chemicals — which only work when an organism comes in contact with them — isn’t necessary unless it’s a heavy saturation. “So then you have to make a decision,” she says. “Do you want persistent toxic chemicals or spiders running around?”
Smith describes Sandidge as outgoing and charismatic. “He’s quite the showman. I think in another life, he could’ve been a Baptist preacher.” For proof, she recalls the time she took Sandidge to an international spider conference in South Africa. “People are usually pretty formal at these things,” she says. “But he was striding across the stage telling them that he knew this spider. They took notice.”
Sandidge never set out to fill in the gaps in brown-recluse research.
“It was all laboratory observation, not what they do in their natural habitat or what they do in houses or how they react to human contact,” he says. “[It was] all this random, let’s-put-it-in-a-vial-and-see-what-it-does kind of stuff.”
As far as he was concerned, it was up to him to set the record straight.
His plan was to teach, but he began to realize that his research was more important to him than doing the university’s bidding. Killing himself to reach university requirements — such as having a paper published in a science journal — didn’t appeal to him anymore.
“The scientific community looks down on you if you work with the public,” he says. “I want my own lab. They won’t support you. There’s not a system in place for it unless it involved whatever machine or grad student they’re pushing at the moment. So you’re kind of on your own.”
His changing feelings began to cement after a car wreck in August 2003. His new gray Saturn sat idly at the busy intersection of Iowa and Orchard streets in Lawrence, waiting for someone to turn. A car approached from behind and rear-ended Sandidge. The impact caused severe whiplash and momentary paralysis. “I was pretty messed up. The car was pretty messed up,” he says. He spent the night in the hospital, but going home didn’t solve problems he would soon encounter.
“I lost my [teaching] job because I couldn’t walk without pain, causing me to lose my house because I had no money,” he says. “I had to leave school for six months, which set me back a semester and a half. I lost part of my research work.” He sued the driver, but the defendant’s attorney pointed out that Sandidge had a prior neck injury from his football days, significantly lowering his reward. “I didn’t get one-fourth of what I was out [because of the injury],” he says. “I’m still paying off credit-card bills from then.” Instead of appealing the ruling, he moved on. “I didn’t have time to waste. I had to do research.”
But he’d had a lot of time to think about his future. “That made me realize I didn’t want a sedentary lifestyle of somebody writing papers all day or writing the next PowerPoint presentation to teach a class full of kids who don’t want to listen.”
He decided to pour all of his brown-recluse knowledge into his own pest-control business. And shortly after launching Brown Recluse Solutions, he married Kristina Krusemark, originally from Pratt, Kansas, a small town between Dodge City and Wichita. He met her when she worked at a Lawrence coffee shop that he frequented during his research days. He says his wife wishes he’d work less, and she worries about the chemicals he uses but knows he’s careful.
He says people have questioned his decision to leave academia and go into pest control. “Why do that instead of being high on the hill, yuppity-yuppity and all that stuff? I just felt like it was needed. I couldn’t get my message out to the people.”
His message often includes chidings.
On home builders: “Poor, poor, poor construction. The vast majority of new houses aren’t good and … I typically see that when new houses have recluses, they have way more than older houses.”
On home inspectors: “Some are unwilling to go into attics, and if they get bit, your home insurance will be paying for it.”
The general public: “People associate spider infestations with dirty homes, nastiness … and being a filthy person, but that has nothing to do with it.”
Impatient customers: “People don’t feel right unless you come to their house and spray something. But I’m trying to do a minimally invasive, maximum-investigation technique to find out all I can about the organism. But people don’t catch on to that.”
Doctors: “Doctors have been so wrong [about spider bites] for so long … it makes me upset. If you have a stomachache, the doctor might give you pills that you have to pay for even if they don’t work. And if you don’t pay, they’ll take you to court. There’s no other business like it.”
Academia: “I don’t want to have to fight for grants to do research. Research that they dictate. I don’t want to be a professor — it has nothing for me.”
And, most of all, other pest-control companies: “They’ll send two technicians who will be there for four hours working on a house that will still have recluses [after their treatment]. I go through in three and a half hours and get rid of them.”
Sandidge’s treatment of Mr. and Mrs. Jones’ house has led him to the closet of the master bedroom. Cardboard boxes and an army of shoes, mostly women’s, line the floor of the well-lighted walk-in. Most of the hanging clothes have been removed. In the ceiling is a door to the attic.
“If you want to get the heebie-jeebies scared out of you, go up there,” Sandidge says. He’s fairly sure the ceiling door will open up to a wasteland of dust, dirt and insulation, fully infested.
“It’s gotta be,” he says. “Usually what I’ll do is push the door up a little bit, and they come falling out.”
He stares up at the door as if imagining what’s on the other side.
“Most people don’t want to go up there,” he says with a wide smile.
Strapping on knee guards, filling his many patch pockets with tools and vials, he asks Mrs. Jones about the roof replacement done on the house recently. Improper roof replacement can cause a brown-recluse population to flourish in an attic.
Because he will be spraying in a tight environment, he puts on a respirator mask, headgear reminiscent of a World War I gas mask. He climbs up the ladder and slowly lifts the door.
“Awww, not bad,” he calls down, referring to the roof replacement. “Somebody knew what they were doing.”
Like an astronaut on the moon, he takes big, careful steps around the dirty-white insulation, wincing as he limbos around vertical support boards. His headlamp glimmering faintly, he continuously disappears and reappears from the mound of insulation toward the back of the attic.
The smell of his botanical agent accompanies him as he comes back toward the door. He steps out from the attic entrance and down the ladder, eager to pull off the cumbersome mask. His breathing is a little heavy after the exertion of working in the attic. He’s covered in sweat, webs and insulation particles.
“Not so bad,” he says. “I think the roof was put on right. There’s a few companies in town that care. Some don’t, and I have to clean it up sometimes,” he says, referring to spider-attracting debris.
Later, outside, he goes to his Toyota Tacoma truck and pulls a doctored piece of equipment from the back. “I have the same stuff that’s in everybody’s truck, but some of mine has been souped up,” he says as he adjusts an extension tube that he has added to the original body. It’s basically an outdoor duster, more powerful than an indoor tool should be. It’s held together by duct tape. A jet nozzle concentrates the flow of the dust for precision application. “It’s been tweaked for maximum efficiency,” he says proudly. “It’s like a car. Every car is made to do the same thing: to go. But some get there faster. You can make your car go faster or stay like everybody else’s. I choose to make my car go fast.”
Sandidge says he had a five-year plan for his business but that he’s met its goals in nearly two years.
Next on the list: completing a brown-recluse-control book, transforming part of his McLouth garage into a climate-controlled research lab and working on a patent for his application tool.
“It doesn’t exist anywhere except in my hands,” he says. “And I have about a hundred of them in my shop. I think once they hit the market, I’ll be rich.”
