Jackson Free Press

Millsaps biology professor Dr. Brent Hendrixson's fascination with eight-legged crawling creatures started when he was a child and is now taking him to places like Costa Rica for research.

"Right now I focus exclusively on tarantulas," Hendrixson says. "It's a project I've wanted to do since undergrad, but I've been interested in spiders, tarantulas and other things people don't like since I was 3."

Hendrixson, 32, maintains that there are medical and scientific benefits to studying tarantulas, and he has recently received a grant that will allow him to venture into Costa Rica to study the species that reside there.

"Tarantulas are a group of spiders are considered to be primitive," Hendrixson says. "Very little is known about them. I want to understand what kind of species and diversity of these spiders that we even have. … "You have to know what's out there to know the human benefit. There could be potential cures in the venom of spiders to treat diseases. You really need to know what's out there."

In Hendrixson's research lab at the college, he houses a collection of the fuzzy arachnids, and explains that the number can fluctuate from 50 to 250, but currently he has about 120. "I don't really think of them as pets; they're just research animals at this point," he says. "I've had to learn not to be attached to them. Fifteen years ago I would have considered them pets."

Hendrixson says that the most common misconception about spiders is that all of them are deadly. "There are more than 40,000 species of spiders on the planet, and only a dozen or two dozen have been seen to have deadly bites," Hendrixon says. "They've been glorified by Hollywood and the media as being these sinister animals that look for you to bite you, but that's not the case."

Originally from Thornton, Colo., Hendrixson received his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Northern Colorado. He earned his master's degree in biology from West Texas A&M University and a doctorate in biology from East Carolina University. He moved to Jackson in August 2008 to work at Millsaps.