Headlamp gleaming, he [Willis J. Gertsch] has spent nights searching for specimens [of spiders] in such unlikely places as high-altitude peaks in the Rocky Mountains, Mexican deserts alive with scorpions, and a tropic island in the Panama Canal Zone. This sort of thing has been going on for more than 20 years, ever since Gertsch first caught the spider bug in college. He’s even more enraptured now than when he started, so much so that he usually works 2 hours or so at home every day after office hours. To the general public, araneophobes all (just plain scared of spiders), such devotion is incomprehensible.