“Should you worry?” we are asked again and again as we are lured into the web of a thoroughly engrossing new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. No, of course not, we are assured, over and over: “My venom isn’t likely to cause a deep wound.” “My bite tends to have only mild effects.” “Only if you are an insect or maybe a small fish.” But here and there, a warning: “My fangs are small, but my venom is potent.”


Ah, spiders. You may enter this show, “Spiders Alive!,” a full-fledged arachnophobe, but you are encouraged to emerge an arachnophile — or at least an admirer. Less than 1 percent of the world’s 43,000 spider species have venom dangerous to humans. And spiders, we read, “are among the most successful animals on the planet. At home everywhere from deserts to rain forests to crowded cities, they inhabit every continent but Antarctica.”


But if spiders still strike you as fearsome, consider the alternative: We learn that in an acre of woodland, a spider consumes more than 80 pounds of insects a year. Which option — a single spider or an overweight suitcase of crawling and flying bugs — is less appealing?


Spend some time at this exhibition even if you don’t reach the point of wanting to devote your life to studying these eight-legged, carnivorous, bifurcated, silk-spinning creatures, as has the exhibition’s curator, Norman Platnick of the museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology. You will be amazed at nature’s fantastical imagination and evolutionary inventiveness in shaping such arachnids.


There are fishing spiders that rest their forelegs on the surfaces of ponds, ready to sense vibrations of potential prey, using surface tension as if it were a liquid web. There are spiders that weave their silk into a kind of net that is not passively erected, but deliberately dropped on victims. Some tarantulas use their hind legs to flick sharp hairs from their abdomen as a form of defense. “The tiny projectiles,” we read, “are irritating to humans and can be fatal to small predators if inhaled.”


The Giant vinegarroon lives up to its name by shooting a vinegar-smelling spray from its abdomen. Trapdoor spiders burrow into the ground, their flat, plated rear end seeming to seal the hole, so their predators don’t suspect a potential meal below. This doesn’t even begin to suggest spiders’ sex lives, in which pedipalps — leglike appendages on males — play a central role.


“Want to be scared by spiders?” we are asked. “Go to a horror movie. Want to be awed? Get up close and personal with the real thing.”


That is what happens here; many of these spiders are indeed alive. Yes, there are stage atmospherics, which the museum has down to a science — the lighted outline of an orb web on the floor, for example, or a sculptured female golden orb-web spider, 70 times life size, mounted on the ceiling. And there are text panels with often remarkable details. (“Spiders can give up a leg to escape a predator. A young spider is often able to grow the limb back.”) But the real sensations are these creatures, some 20 of which are nestled in the underbrush of glass display cases.


The most dangerous are sure to draw the most attention. Next to displays of live (and poisonous) black widows, we see another case (glassed in as well) of the medicinal antidote to their neurotoxin-laden venom: Latrodectus mactans (“Black Widow Spider Antivenin”).


And don’t miss the hyperactive brown recluse, the size of a hairy fist, with a violin-shaped mark on its head and a tendency to emerge swiftly from dark, hidden spaces. In South America, we learn, it is called “la araña detrás de los cuadros” (“the spider behind the pictures on the wall”). Its venom can cause a “deep wound that takes weeks or even months to heal” — the price paid for not giving enough attention to hanging an artwork.