Spider Expert Cheryl Y. Hayashi On Silk, Webs, and More

Spider Scientist Cheryl Y. Hayashi on Silk, Webs, and More – Visual Cue Transcript

[MUSIC BEGINS]

We see a close-up shot of a tarantula walking across a person's palm

CHERYL Y. HAYASHI (Leon Hess Director of Comparative Biology Research): I first became interested in studying spiders when I was in college.

We see Dr. Hayashi speaking on camera.

HAYASHI: I was very fortunate that there was a professor who allowed me to first feed her colony of animals, and it turned out this colony of animals were spiders.

A series of images of spiders appear on screen: an extreme close-up of a brown jumping spider on a white background; a green and brown spider with long, thin legs in a web against a green background, a spider striped with brown, tan, and orange hanging upside down in a web; an extreme close-up of a black jumping spider with acid green pincers against an orange background.

HAYASHI: And that's when I first had the opportunity to get up close and personal with spiders. That's what changed my life–was just having to see them, and having to interact with them, and I started noticing things about things about these organisms that had never occurred to me before, that I never would have thought of just by seeing pictures of them in books.

Drawings of a DNA double helix float from the bottom of the screen to the top. In the background, first an image of a black spider sitting in a web, then an image of a black widow spider spinning a web.

HAYASHI: In my research, I try to understand the relationship between changes in spider genomes to changes in their ability to make silks and the characteristics of their silks.

Dr. Hayashi again appears speaking on camera.

HAYASHI: I don't know if other people have tried to do this, but I certainly have tried to just take a ball of string and just to see if I could make a spider web, and it's pretty darn hard.

Another series of spider images: A large brown spider behind its thick, white cobweb; A yellow and black spider sitting at the bottom of a large orb web; An orange and brown spider with a few strands of silk around it.

HAYASHI: So, we all have seen spiders that, you know, make cobwebs, or some that make that very iconic orb web, versus some spiders that don't make very much of a web.

A spider with long black and yellow legs wraps its prey in silk.

HAYASHI: All those behaviors to make those different architectures, it's genetically based. What are those genes? What's controlling them, how have they evolved?

A large blue and gray cave spider with spindly legs and large front claws crawls away from the camera.

HAYASHI: I would love to be able to study questions like that about those behaviors.

The screen is split into three horizontal bands of images: tropical fish on bottom, multi-colored butterflies in the middle, and poisonous frogs on top.

HAYASHI: This is a really exciting time to be a biologist...

Now three vertical bands of images appear over the existing images: A woman looking into a microscope at left, a centrifuge machine at center, gloved hands filling vials from a pipette at right.

HAYASHI: ...because of the revolution that's been going on in DNA sequencing and DNA analysis technology. I can ask a lot of questions that really weren't possible before.

Archival footage of a black widow spider spinning a web.

HAYASHI: So far I've really been focusing on how they make the silk, so basically how they produce that ball of string.

Archival footage of a light-and-dark patterned spider walking along a branch.

HAYASHI: But how do you get the body parts? How do you get the choreography? I'd love to know that.

Footage of specimen storage cabinets from the Museum's collection. The camera tilts down to reveal two floors of cabinets.

HAYASHI: The American Museum has the world's largest spider collection.

Hands pull a tray of specimen jars out from a storage cabinet.

HAYASHI: There's over a million specimens right here in this museum.

A Museum employee helps two young children identify a fossil at the Museum's annual ID Day event.

HAYASHI: I think museums play a very big role in shaping, hopefully inspiring, the next generation of scientists.

Visitors look around the displays in the Museum's Hall of Biodiversity.

HAYASHI: I think when students of any age enter a museum and they see what nature has produced, when they see the products of evolution...

Dr. Hayashi speaks on camera.

HAYASHI: ...I think there are going to be some people that are just going to start asking these "how and why" questions that will just keep you up at night that will turn you into a biologist.