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| Male tarantulas are on the move during mating season. |
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| Ken Lavin, left, a volunteer guide at Mount Diablo State Park, talks about tarantulas with E.J. Victor, her brother, Sean, and their mother, Sharon Epstein. The park is a hot spot for the arachnids in the San Francisco Bay Area. |
Warm weather has extended tarantula mating season in California; ‘gentle giants’
By Jim Carlton
October 8, 2019
MOUNT DIABLO STATE PARK, Calif.—Pity the male tarantula in October. He’s weak from starvation and desperate for love. The object of his desire lives underground, forcing him to wander around until he stumbles over a female, who may kill him after mating. First, he may stumble into horrified humans.
Warm weather in the San Francisco Bay Area has extended tarantula mating season—a surprisingly public affair that has led to advisories from officials to be on the lookout for thousands of giant male spiders. The spiders aren’t dangerous to people, in fact it’s the other way around. That message is proving a tough sell around Halloween.
“Some people really make them out to be the devil, but they are gentle giants,” said Michael Marchiano, a volunteer naturalist for the Mount Diablo State Park, doing his part to improve public relations for a creature he calls misunderstood.
The thought of tarantula armies on the march unnerves many people. “Nope! Not going to San Francisco this month,” Michael Hallden-Abberton, a retired chemist from Maple Glen, Pa., tweeted over the weekend. He says he’s not afraid of tarantulas one at a time, but the idea of so many crawling around the Bay Area got his attention.
A sign at the entrance to a trail in Mount Diablo State Park tells visitors: “Tarantula venom is very mild and won’t harm you—unless you’re the size of a small lizard or cricket.”
Some locals are facing their fears head-on.
This week, Mimi Victor knelt down on a dusty hiking trail one evening at Mount Diablo park—a hot spot for the giant arachnids—to get a closer look at a wild tarantula.
“I’m scared,” the 10-year-old from Fair Oaks, Calif., said softly, as the three-inch spider crawled along. “Be careful,” said her father, Rich Victor, as her mother and their two other children looked on with wide eyes.
Kevin Sherwood, who lives near Mount Diablo in Walnut Creek, Calif., said he doesn’t mind tarantulas, but his two teenage daughters are afraid of them, as well as almost any other type of spider.
“They FaceTime me to remove a small spider from the bathroom,” said Mr. Sherwood, a 62-year-old marketing manager.
Communities around other tarantula-mating areas in California are trying to build up the arachnid’s public image. Coarsegold, Calif., in the Sierra Nevada foothills is planning its annual Tarantula Festival on Oct. 26. Among the activities: a “Scream-off Contest” and “Hairy Leg Contests (Both men and women).”
The Henry W. Coe State Park near Morgan Hill, Calif., hosted its annual Tarantula Fest on Oct. 5. Guests were encouraged to “rub elbows (so to speak) with some of our fuzzy, friendly eight-legged guests of honor.”
Natalie Knowles, of Aliso Viejo, Calif., had intended to take her daughter for a simple nature hike this week in Mount Diablo park. Instead, she stared nervously as 7-year-old Malaika held a three-inch tarantula in her cupped hands as its owner, volunteer hiking guide Ken Lavin, talked soothingly about the animal at a picnic table.
He keeps the tarantula for educational purposes. “Everyone, I think, is born with an innate fear of tarantulas,” he said, “but very few spiders can break a human’s skin.”
For many, that’s beside the point.
“Was it creepy crawly feeling?” Ms. Knowles, 30, asked her daughter after the tarantula retreated back to Mr. Lavin. Malaika thought a moment, and responded: “It felt light, and when it got off I felt the claws.”
Tarantulas have gotten a bad rap, defenders say, in part because of the way they have been portrayed by movies. The 1955 monster film “Tarantula!” depicted a giant tarantula whose deadly rampage was stopped when it was incinerated by napalm from Air Force fighter jets.
“Hollywood and the media have made tarantulas seem monstrous, so to many people these slow-moving spiders appear ominous and threatening. Nothing is farther from the truth,” the Mount Diablo park website says. “North American tarantulas have a very mild venom that can easily paralyze a small arthropod but it is totally harmless to humans.”
Most tarantulas neither bite hard nor are considered particularly venomous to humans. They can release barbed hairs if threatened, but are so small that they serve only as an irritant to skin, according to the World Animal Foundation, a nonprofit based in Vermilion, Ohio.
In this world, the female has the long-term advantage. They live to procreate another day, as long as 25 years. The males, on the other hand, go on to die soon after mating between age 4 and 7—in some cases immediately after sex at the fangs of their mate.
“If the female is hungry she may make her anxious suitor her next meal,” states a tarantula fact sheet from the National Park Service.
Tarantulas themselves face numerous threats. One is from habitat destruction due to development, which has reduced their numbers, Mr. Marchiano said. One of its most deadly foes is the tarantula wasp, whose sting leaves the arachnid paralyzed but still alive—until it is consumed by the wasp’s offspring.
As he has done for 20 years, Mr. Lavin, outing coordinator for the Greenbelt Alliance, went out searching for tarantulas near sunset—when the giant males resume their search for a mate after the heat of the day.
After hiking about a half mile into a canyon, he saw the Victor family excitedly looking at something on the side of the road. It turned out to be a male tarantula, trying to hide in some grass—just feet away from what Mr. Lavin figured was the burrow of a female. It was surrounded by humans.
Write to Jim Carlton at jim.carlton@wsj.com
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