Biology instructor studies spiders during sabbatical

Growing up, Dr. Margaret Hodge would keep spiders in little jars on her back porch to watch them lay their eggs and then watch the eggs hatch.

“When I was a little girl, I was really interested in bugs, and my parents encouraged my curiosity,” said Hodge, a lecturer of biology at LSMSA.

That fascination went away when Hodge was a teenager and spiders would keep getting in her bedroom in the apartment she lived in with her family.

“I developed this terrible phobia of them,” she said. “It bothered me because I knew it was irrational.”

Hodge decided to face that fear when she was required to do a research project in her animal behavior class in college.

“I did a research project on spiders so I could overcome the phobia,” said Hodge. “I remembered when I was young that I had been fascinated by them so that made it even more irrational.”

Through that project and meeting other researchers who studied spiders, Hodge decided to study them when she attended graduate school.

Fast forward a few years and Hodge is still fascinated by spiders, and with the help of the LSMSA Foundation and its sabbatical program, she was able to continue her research into the social behavior in spiders during the spring of 2017.

“That is what I have studied, trying to explain how social behavior can evolve in animals that are typically really antisocial,” said Hodge. “That has been my general theme through all of my research, looking at social behavior, aggregations, spiders that live in really close proximity.”

Hodge chose to participate in the sabbatical program because she had a number of papers she wished to write and as time passed she got further away from when she did the research.

“I felt like if I didn’t do this now, it would never get done,” she said. “A second reason was that I am doing this research on spider biodiversity and it is really time consuming and is almost impossible to do during the semester.

“I saw the sabbatical application date, I applied and I got it.”

During the sabbatical, she worked on three papers. The first, “Sexual dimorphism in the Lampshade Spider, Hypochilus thorelli (Araneae Hypochillidae),” was accepted to be published in the fall edition of the “Southeastern Naturalist.” She submitted “Habitat associations of the web-building wolf spiders Sosippus floridanus and Sosippus placidus (Lycosidae, Sosippinae): a widespread generalist and an endemic specialist” to the “Journal of Arachnology.” Her last paper “The effect of forest regeneration practices on spider diversity in Northwest Louisiana” is almost finished and will be submitted to the “Journal of Arachnology.”

Hodge expressed gratitude to the LSMSA Foundation for funding the sabbatical for teachers.

“I think we are so lucky that the Foundation provides this opportunity,” she said. “When I started here, we didn’t have the sabbatical program.

“I can’t thank them enough.”

The sabbatical program began in the fall of 2015 and is funded by donations from the Richard G. Brown Fund for Faculty Advancement. The money will be used to cover the costs of two semester-long sabbaticals for the next several years.