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GSJ: Eight Legs, Endless Fascination

October 23, 2025 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
$5 – $10

Eight Legs, Endless Fascination: An Introduction to Georgia Spiders for Aficionados and Arachnophobes!

Thursday, October 23rd, 7-8:30 pm

In-Person and Streaming

Check out the stream on our YouTube.

Location: Wild Heaven, Toco Hills – 2935B N Druid Hills Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30329

Featured Speaker: Erin Ricketts, MD

Are the spiders in your yard causing you to itch? Are you afraid of things with too many legs? Do you know how to tell if that web you walked into belongs to something venomous? Do you like the idea of spiders, but need a little more help to actually love them? Then we have something fun for you. Whether you are an aficionado or arachnophobe, if you are looking for laughs, facts, and new spider skills, this is the presentation for you.

 

Speaker Name:

Erin Ricketts, MD

Speaker Bio:

Erin Ricketts is a Medical Officer working in Global Tuberculosis. From 2021-2023 she served in the Epidemic Intelligence Service as a field officer in North Carolina where she played the role of the state Legionella subject matter expert and worked on state and national outbreaks of infectious disease including monkeypox virus, COVID-19, highly-pathogenic avian influenza, pediatric hepatitis, and varicella. She also played roles in advising residents on rabies exposure guidelines and dragging ticks for Powassan virus. She received her Doctor of Medicine degree in 2018 at Tulane University and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at UC Riverside in 2021 where she co-founded Inland Empire Harm Reduction.
In her free time Erin is an entomology hobbyist and helps operate the National Spider Support Facebook group and moderate r/spiderbites and r/brownreclusebites on Reddit. She no longer keeps hundreds of venomous spiders for nebulous research projects but has been known to have a captured Latrodectus species at home on occasion.

 

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