If you had to think of something that makes your skin crawl… spiders and jellyfish would have to be up there.

So who would choose to WORK with them?? Dr Robert Raven is one of the world’s leading arachnologists and Dr Jamie Seymour gets up close and personal with deadly box jellyfish every day.

To reach his current role as Senior Curator of Spiders at the Queensland Museum, Dr Robert Raven has conquered a long-standing fear of spiders that was instilled in him from childhood.

“My father was a mining engineer who used to go into disused mine shafts. If someone tells you stories in vivid detail about redbacks going down the back of your neck, and you’re told that at the right age, the fear stays.”

Not so for Dr Jamie Seymour, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Tropical Biology at James Cook University.

“When my dad was a kid, he was in a canoe that tipped over and everyone except he and a neighbour drowned, so he taught us to swim as soon as we could crawl. We were always around the water, so it was pre-ordained that I would do something in the marine environment.”

So how did Dr Raven conquer his fear? He says the time he crawled into his tent and found a huntsman the size of his head - just above his face - was a defining one.

“I just raced out of the tent and then had to go back in and get it.”

Much of his work takes place at night, collecting spiders in the bush using a torch strapped to his head. He says that peeling out of the web is the best way to deal with the problem of walking into the path of a spider.

“What you try to do is reverse what you did, just back out and it’ll peel off your face, but on a normal night I’m hammering into dozens of webs within minutes so it’s not that easy.”

Much of Dr Seymour’s work involves tracking box jellyfish to find out more about their behaviour. So how do you tag a jellyfish?

“What we originally thought what we could do was cut the jellyfish up, put the tag in, and suture it back… but the sutures just fall out and you end up with an animal that falls in half,” Dr Seymour says.

“So we got some superglue, but it’s actually toxic and it killed the jellyfish. I ended up talking to a cosmetic surgeon who recommended a non-toxic superglue that’s used on people. It’s $200 a tube instead of $10, but it works.”

Interesting findings? Jellyfish have eyes, they can decide what direction they swim and they sleep at night. And speed? Grant Hackett would only beat a box jellyfish by three minutes in a 1500 metre race.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…