October 16, 2013 – Three Chicago Streets & Sanitation workers collecting garbage near North Avenue and Sedgwick Street got an early Halloween fright last week when they found a tarantula in the back of their truck.

The large, eight-legged spider may have been an exotic pet thrown out with the refuse of a nearby residential building.

Luckily, however, the tarantula will live out its retirement years at the Lincoln Park Zoo thanks to a downtown ward superintendent whose job is to oversee city services such as repairing potholes and removing graffiti.

Anthony Coppolillo, who works closely with 42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly’s office, was “in the trenches,” as he describes it, on October 8, a grid garbage day on which all of a neighborhood’s garbage is collected. He was riding in a Ford Explorer with a Refuse Collection Coordinator, who was supervising five three-person teams of garbage collectors.

Coppolillo was not impressed at first when a call came in to the coordinator from a driver and two sanitation workers collecting garbage on the north side.

“What I heard on the radio was, ‘there’s a spider as big as a tarantula,ֻ” Coppolillo (left) recalled on Tuesday. “I’m thinking, tell them to run the cycle through the back of the garbage truck and keep moving. So what, it’s a spider.” The driver, a man, said the refuse collectors, both women, “will not move until someone comes and takes care of this.” Although pressed for time to collect a lot of garbage that day, Coppolillo decided he needed to see this for himself.

“So we go up there and they’re standing around a shoebox.” He walked over to the shoebox, looked in, “and it’s as big as my hand. It’s legit, a tarantula.”

Despite their fearsome reputation, most tarantulas, which can have a leg span of 12 inches, are not dangerous to humans but a bite can cause serious discomfort for several days. Fangs inject venom into a victim, usually a mice, bird, or small snake.

Tarantulas are popular as pets and Coppolillo believes this one was thrown out with trash, still in its cage. They found it in a black garbage cart.

“So when they dumped the black cart, the cage and the tarantula came tumbling into the back of the garbage truck and smashed open and it was crawling along and they wouldn’t get near it.”

The driver of the truck grabbed a discarded shoebox “and scooped it up.”

The shoebox was set down in an alley. “And then they just left it. They wouldn’t touch it after that.”

Convinced the tarantula was old and harmless, Coppolillo put the lid on the shoebox and got back in the truck. He showed the tarantula to the coordinator, who was driving, but only after he pulled over in case, says Coppolillo, he started “freaking out.”

The advice he got from a city official was to take it to an animal care and control office, but Coppolillo feared the tarantula would be destroyed there. So he drove it to the Lincoln Park Zoo on North Clark Street, quickly finding an expert who confirmed the spider was a tarantula. After a brief discussion with other zoo personnel, they agreed to take care of it.

(Above) Diane Mulkerin, curator of the Regenstein Small Mammal-Reptile House, inspects a tarantula delivered in a shoebox to the Lincoln Park Zoo.

Throwing away the tarantula was not an option for Coppolillo. “The thing’s too big. It’s lived this long, and someone threw it out. I actually kind of felt bad for it.”

He says when he lifted up the top of the shoebox, “it would back away, like it was afraid.”