In the garage of the building was the Spider Room-a laboratory of sorts filled with bottles of different spiders in various stages of growth. There must have been over 500 transparent plastic bottles at the time I was there, each one neatly labelled, and all sitting one next to the other with spiders in them. For air, each bottle had tiny pinholes in its lid. Feeding was done through another small hole in the lid: this hole was plugged with cotton. All these spiders and their activities including growth, moulting, mating and hatching of babies were monitored by Dr Vijayalakshmi. She had an assistant called Selvan and he followed her instructions, keeping the records and making the notings in a log book. During the fortnight that I worked with Dr Vijayalakshmi, I simply slipped into this set-up, reading books about spiders that Dr Vijayalakshmi gave me, then learning to identify different spiders and simultaneously helping Selvan in all the tasks that were needed to maintain the huge spider population housed in the garage. The spiders that Dr Vijayalakshmi deals with are called giant crab spiders. These spiders do not build webs. They feed only on cockroaches. The spiders were a little smaller than their prey i.e. the cockroaches. I used to separate the babies, feed them, check the moultings and catch flies for feeding them. I read a lot of books here and sometimes caught the spiders in the garden in order to identify and study them. Spiders were not the only creatures housed in the garage. There were also cockroaches bred in buckets with rolled cardboard in the centre and broken biscuit pieces thrown in the bucket. The cockroaches were fed once a week or so to the giant crab spiders. The smaller spiders used to get flies to eat and these were caught by us everyday from the garden. The flies have to be fed alive to the spiders, so we used transparent plastic bottles to trap the flies and once caught we would carefully put them into the spider's bottle. Sometimes the spider would immediately catch the prey and eat it; at other times the fly would buzz around in the bottle for days till the spider was ready to eat it. Dr Vijayalakshmi also bred a particular species of fly in a small cage with fine mesh with a small saucer of milk in the centre as a medium for breeding. Baby spiders were also housed individually in bottles and these were fed fly larvae or the larvae which come when maida or rava begins to lose its freshness. The purpose of all these experiments was to find out which types of spiders were useful for using as pest control agents to deal with cockroaches. Information about spiders such as their growth, hardiness, their eating habits, reproduction etc. are important indicators of the species of spiders that can be kept in houses as predators for cockroaches.