Chad Heins

Mankato, MN

I am a member of the Biology Department at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota where I teach courses in the area of animal and plant biology as well as ecology. I've been a birdwatcher for nearly 35 years but was drawn to the smaller fauna while doing a floral survey during graduate school. Butterflies, then dragonflies sucked me into the world of entomology where I am now hopelessly (and joyfully) mired in the world of spiders. Several years ago I searched for a list of spiders found in Minnesota and came up empty. That pushed my research in that direction and resulted in my website (see above) which has a current checklist of the spiders of Minnesota. I continue to do research in that area to understand spider distribution and refine the checklist.