Obituary: ‘Spider man’ Charles Dondale wrote books, papers, poems about spiders

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There are not many children who, in all honesty, could point to their father as the real spider man.

But such was the case for the six Dondale children, whose father, Charles, was one of this country’s foremost spider researchers, curator of Canada’s National Spider Collection and past-president of the American Arachnological Society.

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Charles Dondale wrote 80 scientific papers, books and poems about spiders.

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Dondale also proselytyzed on behalf of spiders and once hosted a National Capital Commission event aimed at improving their creepy image.

“Some people are petrified by spiders — I don’t know why,” Dondale once told an interviewer. “They’re very helpful predatory creatures: They kill bugs that do a lot of harm, and they really have no desire to hurt you.”

He encouraged people not to squash spiders they find in their homes, but rather to collect them in a jar and put them outside … or leave them alone. “You can get some beautiful photos,” he noted.

Dondale died in March at his residence in Carleton Place. He was 95.

“He was very serious in the sense that he took his science and his work very seriously, but he always had a twinkle in his eye,” said McGill University entomology professor Christopher Buddle, one of many scientists mentored by Dondale. “He was never pretentious; he was always learning and teaching about spiders.”

Son Graeme Dondale said his father loved to talk spiders. Every time they went camping, he said, his father would collect spiders from the forest and would always attract the attention of nearby children.

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“He was like the pied piper,” Graeme said.

Charles Denton Dondale was born and raised on a small farm in Princedale, N.S. Part of a large family — Dondale had nine siblings — he was a gifted student, but he spent a year in the merchant marines in order to raise money to pay for post-secondary school.

He spent two years at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College studying pest control and one day while shaking insects from an apple orchard onto a beating tray — a piece of white cloth stretched over a wooden frame — Dondale noticed an unusual number of spiders among his catch.

The orchard had been sprayed with a minimum amount of pesticide, and Dondale wondered if the spiders could provide fruit growers with a more natural form of insect control.

So began his lifelong fascination with the eight-legged predators.

He earned a science degree, a master’s degree from Ohio State University and a PhD in entomology from McGill University.

Dondale worked as a research scientist at Agriculture Canada for his entire career, first in Kentville, N.S., then in Belleville and finally in Ottawa, where he was curator of the national spider collection. It contained about 150,000 specimens, all of them stored in glass jars filled with ethanol.

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(The spider collection is now part of Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes, one of the five largest collections of its kind in the world with about 18 million specimens.)

As part of his work as a research scientist, Dondale studied spider behaviour, and used that work, including studies on the importance of pheromones in spider courtship, to help separate spiders into different species.

Dondale also helped found the American Arachnological Society and once published a poem in its journal dedicated to spider taxonomy that began:

Outstanding men have labored hard
To classify the spiders.
Problems are many, solutions few.
Too many exceptions — and riders.

Christopher Buddle said it was all part of Dondale’s attempt to make taxonomy — the difficult business of classifying spiders into their families, genera and species — more accessible. Among his most popular books was one aimed at the general public, The Insects and Arachnids of Canada, that helped people identify the bugs around them.

“He and his colleague, Jim Redner, who did the artwork for the books, really transformed the landscape of arachnology in Canada,” Buddle said.

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“Canada has a long history of excellence in arachnology, and the last 20 or 30 years of development is so much because of the foundational work that Charlie Dondale did.”

He retired in 1990 and move to Carleton Place with his wife, Joan, whom he had met while at McGill. They were married for 67 years, but Joan never liked her husband bringing his work home with him.

“My mom was not a fan of spiders,” Graeme Dondale said.

Charles Dondale was a devoted member of Beckwith Baptist Church, a church deacon, choir member, bible teacher and historian.

In retirement, he also bought a woodlot and chainsaw, and cut his own wood for his woodstove well into his 90s.

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