Tarantulas don’t scare this Michigan professor. She is spending her nights among them.

YPSILANTI, MI — Cara Shillington’s love for tarantulas began when a college friend recommended them as house pets.

The Cape Town, South Africa native never thought of having a pet tarantula before, but she got one when she was an undergraduate student at Washington State University in the early 1990s because she “thought it would be cool.”

Three decades later, the thought has evolved into a profound admiration for the creature.

Eventually, she lost track of how many tarantulas she had.

“Within a few months and years, I had a bunch of tarantulas and then started really looking to see what I could do with getting involved with something with research,” Shillington, 66, said.

Now a professor of biology at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Shillington has dedicated her academic ca