Like many arachnidists, Cooke is upset about public attitudes toward spiders, particularly tarantulas. In an interview, conducted in the presence of several very large live and hairy tarantulas, he pointed out that while they can inflict a moderately painful bite when angry, they are not venomous.

"I wouldn't let my 4-year-old son keep one as a pet if they were," he said.

Their bad name, he added, can be traced to the region around Taranto, in southern Italy, from which they take their name. This is the habitat of the true, or European Tarantul, whose bite was said to induce tarantism.

Webster's New International Dictionary defines tarantism as: "A nervous affection characterized by melancholy, stupor, and an uncontrollable desire to dance."

The traditional treatment was to encourage the victim to dance wildly until the effects of the poison wore off. Thus evolved the wild Neapolitan folk dance, the tarantella. According to Cooke, who is writing an article on the subject for Natural History magazine, musicians wandered through the fields at harvest time, ready to offer their services to a victim of tarantula bite.

Interestingly, it has recently been shown that even the European tarantula has been wrongly accused, that it does not inflict the dreaded bite attributed to it but is quite harmless. The real culprit in tarantism is none other than the famous black widow spider. The black widow, Latrodectus mactans, is a comparatively small, inconspicuous, and secretive member of the family Theridiidae, the comb-footed spiders. These include several common cobweb-spinning spiders found in buildings. Latrodectus, whose name comes from the Greek and means "secret biter," is a genus of world-wide distribution containing several species. Although all are highly venomous, only L. mactans is synanthropic, posing a serious threat to people.

Anting is a maintenance behavior during which birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin. The bird may pick up the insects in its bill and rub them on the body (active anting), or the bird may lie in an area of high density of the insects and perform dust bathing-like movements (passive anting).

In 1933, German coleopterist and civil engineer Oscar Scheibel, residing in Ljubjana, Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, purchased from a Slovenian biologist several specimens of an unknown beetle that had been found in the caves near the city of Celje. In 1937, Scheibel published in Entomologische Blätter a description of a light-brown ground beetle a mere five millimeters long under the name Anophthalmus hitleri. After the war, Scheibel is supposed to have claimed that naming the beetle in honor of Hitler had been a subversive act: after all, this was an unlovely species of brown, blind cave beetle that lived hidden from view. This defense must be squared with the original description, the final sentence of which reads, "Dedicated to Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, as an expression of my reverence." No official response from the Reich Chancellery was documented in this case.

To date, Anophthalmus hitleri has been found in but a handful of caves in Slovenia. Particularly after the media discovered and circulated the Hitler beetle story in 2000, interest in this species has been rekindled. A well-preserved specimen of Anophthalmus hitleri can fetch upward of 2,000 euros on the collectors' market; among the bidders, certainly some wish to add the Hitler beetle to their collection of Nazi memorabilia. . .

At least one other species has been named after Adolf Hitler: the fossil Roechlingia hitleri, which belongs to the Palaeodictyoptera, a group of primitive fossil insects. Roechlingia hitleri was described in 1934 by German geologist and paleontologist Paul Guthörl. . .

Extensive research has failed to turn up any other species named in honor of Hitler. This seems surprising, as this form of salute could have proven quite expedient to aspiring German scientists from about 1933 until 1945, at the latest...

The likeliest explanation is that when Hitler patronyms were planned, approval was sought in advance from the Führer (by way of the Reich Chancellery), whether out of respect or perhaps fear of potential consequences. In 1933, for instance, a rose breeder submitted a written request to the Reich Chancellery for permission to introduce to the international market one of his best rose varieties, bearing Hitler's name. Similarly, a nursery owner from Schleswig-Holstein hoped to name a "prized strawberry variety" the "Hitler strawberry," in honor of the Reich Chancellor. They already had a "Hindenburg" strawberry variety in their catalog, he added. In reply to both cases, Hans Heinrich Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery, sent almost identical letters, in which the inquiring parties were informed that, "upon careful consideration, [the reich Chancellor] requests that a name in his honor most kindly not be used." . . .

Perhaps this fundamental rejection of honorary names is the reason that so few hitleris exist.