Professor Greta Binford follows her love for biodiverse habitats, and arachnids
written by Joni Kabana | photography by Amanda Loman
Many shudder at the thought of seeing a brown recluse spider, but not Greta Binford, professor of biology at Lewis & Clark College. Binford revels in studying and teaching biodiversity, including research of brown recluse spiders and their relatives. For her, Oregon is a playground of diverse habitats. “I absolutely love spending time lying on the ground in old-growth forests and looking closely at the tiny, super-diverse life living in the deep, peaty forest floor,” she said. “That’s where soil is made, and the ecosystem of tiny life there will blow your mind.”
Binford attended Purdue University thinking she wanted to be a veterinarian but quickly realized she did not have the fortitude to work with blood and sick animals. After trying a couple other majors, she dropped out of college and moved to a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, where she taught gymnastics and created crafts. A few years later, she went back to school at Miami University with the goal of teaching high school biology. There, a genetics professor hired her to do research in the rainforest at Tambopata Reserve in southeast Peru. “My job was to collect data on social spiders—they live in large colonies and help each other catch prey and take care of each other’s babies,” she said. “It was there where I became aware of the wealth of extraordinary biodiversity that is unknown to us, and that it was under major threat of extinction.”
Binford realized how much she enjoyed engaging in science by “finding the edges of human knowledge, thinking about what information we need and how to collect data that can help us advance knowledge.” She also realized she was capable of being a scientist, which had never occurred to her. “That experience literally changed my life,” she said.
If you’d like to see Binford in action, consider attending SpiderFest, where she welcomes groups into her lab to share some love for biodiversity while demystifying arachnids and scientific careers. “My hope is young people will leave seeing themselves as capable of being scientists, if that’s where their interests lead them,” she said.
