The Amazing Spider-Man : What could be more beautiful than a lacy spider web glistening with dew? : Arachnid Collector Catalogues Crawlers

Jim Ortiz, who shares his house with 6,000 spiders and collects 20 or 30 more each day, insists he’s not a spider activist.

He is, however, determined to collect and catalogue every type of spider in the county before they are trampled by development. Otherwise, he says, some species will be forever lost to science.

“I think they serve a purpose for mankind,” says Ortiz, an arachnologist and former teacher who now owns his own construction company. “It’s like there’s a genetic library disappearing before we know what’s in it.”

Cal State Long Beach entomologist Elbert L. Sleeper says his former student has taken on “a mind-boggling task.”

By using his computer to map where various spiders live in the county, Ortiz, 49, is charting new waters, the professor says.

“To my knowledge, no one else anywhere else in the western United States is doing anything like this,” Sleeper says. “It’s going to be a tremendous piece of work when he’s finished. He’s breaking the ice, and other people are going to swim along behind him, using his methods and techniques.”

Ortiz studied arachnology in college and became a teacher. He started a construction business to make more money but returned to collecting spiders because it seemed to be a way to leave his mark on the world.

Ortiz does most of his work in a tidy, loft-like office that houses thousands of spiders, most of them dead and stored in vials. In one corner is a table and microscope, where Ortiz studies the new specimens he collects each day. Off to the side, a row of beetles and crickets are skewered with pins.

“Take a look at this little guy,” he says, pointing out a live, ogre-faced lynx spider, a spindly green predator clinging to the walls of a glass box.

In part, the assemblage is extraordinary because it includes spiders given to him by Cal State Long Beach after the school’s arachnologist died last year.

Spider diversity is dwindling in Orange County, Ortiz says, but most people lose no sleep worrying about it, because arachnids do not generally elicit the same emotions as, say, eagles and songbirds. And he does not believe that development should cease to protect spiders.

Ortiz likes to point out the positive traits of spiders. Some may be cannibals and others are venomous, but spiders also catch flies, eat insects and have toxins that can be genetically altered to produce proteins of benefit to medicine.

Then there’s their aesthetic value. What could be more beautiful than a lacy spider web glistening with dew? he wonders. “It just wouldn’t be right to get up in the morning and not see spider webs everyplace,” he says. “It would be like a forest without birds singing.”

Ortiz hopes to use his information about local spiders to help persuade developers to build where it will do arachnids the least harm and to encourage Laguna Niguel officials to preserve areas such as the Salt Creek Corridor as open space.

“I’d hate to say, ‘All the spiders in Laguna Niguel are in my room in bottles. The rest are wiped out by development,’ ” Ortiz says.

Ortiz has identified about 400 species captured in Orange County. Some in his collection, however, are more exotic, including a bulbous “bird spider” from Florida, named for its dietary penchant for small birds; an orange cave-dweller without eyes, described by Ortiz as “your worst nightmare”; a “whip scorpion” from Mexico, and a deadly 6-inch scorpion that a military friend brought back from Iraq.

“I always say, don’t send me back a souvenir, bring me back spiders,” Ortiz says. “A lot of people will never see anything like this in a lifetime.”

The problem of dwindling spider species is worst in North County, he says. “I can go into Garden Grove and list on my hands the number of spiders I’m going to collect,” he says. “A lot of the stuff that was there before is gone. You’ll never see it again.”

It is actually the diversity of spiders, not the number, that is affected by development, Ortiz stresses. Spiders that are comfortable near human habitats--black widows, for example--are seldom in short supply.

At risk is a spider from the zodariidae family, a dwindling species that Ortiz says is found only in the Channel Islands and the sand dunes of San Clemente and Seal Beach. The California trapdoor spider, once plentiful along the bluffs of Newport Beach, has been wiped out in North County and is disappearing farther south too.

And a local subspecies of California tarantula, which burrows underground when threatened, is also dying off, he says.

“Any time you develop a small regional area, like a valley or hillcrest, you could possibly wipe out an entire species or subspecies of tarantula,” he says.

Within five years, Ortiz--who taught for 15 years in Huntington Beach high schools and county community colleges--intends to publish an illustrated schoolbook on Southern California spiders. He also hopes to use the Salt Creek Corridor to create a nature program and center for the Capistrano Unified School District, where he is a substitute teacher.

As for his spiders, they will eventually be included in his will. Most likely, they will be left to a university or museum.

Certainly, Ortiz says, they are not coveted by his daughters, 18 and 22, who he says “despise” the creatures and prefer not to talk about them.

Their friends “don’t know when they’re having their slumber party, there are 6,000 spiders in the room next to them,” he says, “and some of them are alive.”