It’s late August and summer is fading away. While you’re worrying about where last year’s Halloween decorations went, some real horrors are emerging from the shadows looking for a little love.
Every year swarms of Texas brown tarantulas (Aphonopelma hentzi) are taking advantage of cooling temperatures in the southern U.S. to seek out a mate. And 2024 won’t be much different, experts predict.
These fist-sized arachnids are common in Texas and New Mexico, with populations in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.
Yet it is places like Colorado where the spiders show themselves most clearly.
Not that most people usually notice – they are strangely shy for an animal with such a fearsome reputation. They usually cool off on the ground in heavily sheltered places, hiding in abandoned burrows during the day, emerging at night to feast on an insect or two or perhaps a small rodent.
That all changes from late August through October. Driven by deeper desires, male tarantulas emerge from the shadows and brave the open ground to seek the attention of any willing and able female… presumably performing the tarantula equivalent of swiping left and right as they search for the perfect jaws to snuggle up to. Or consume, whatever the mood may be that evening.
It’s a busy time for the cheerful arachnids, with males travelling up to a kilometre in a season to complete their task, along with over 100 females.
Fertilized eggs then produce a thousand or more newborns, which take about 45 to 60 days to gestate under the watchful eye of the mother. Uh, eyes. All eight of them.
What hordes of giant spiders see as a late spring break party might be seen as an early Halloween horror show by arachnophobes. However, the fact that they’re the size of a baseball should actually be an advantage: they’re much less likely to slip through small openings and enter aimlessly.
Tarantulas are docile unless provoked, they will rear up and bare their fangs when upset, and if mistreated they can deliver a painful nip. Their stiff bristles can also irritate our skin and eyes, especially when shed in a defensive mist of spider fluff.
So if you find a desperately searching fluff ball on your living room floor (and politely insisting that it go away won’t work), try turning a bowl and a sheet of cardboard into the spider equivalent of a five-star Uber service and drop it off outside.
Since male tarantulas only live for 10 years (much shorter than the decades females live) and don’t reach adulthood until around age 8, they’ll no doubt appreciate the help finding romance before their time runs out.
Of course, not everyone hates these beautiful creatures. Towns like La Junta, Colorado celebrate the tarantula Mardi Gras every September.
With spider numbers in the region declining in recent years—possibly due to climate change, unregulated collection, and habitat loss—the horny arachnids could use some love themselves.
