ShareThisBy CHUCK SQUATRIGLIA
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Male tarantulas are skittering all over Mount Diablo in the San Francisco Bay Area as quickly as their eight legs will carry them, trying to mate as often as they can before starving to death, falling apart or being eaten by a hungry mate.
They've been biding their time underground for seven long, lonely years, awaiting puberty and their one chance to propagate a species that has survived for millions of years and changed very little in all that time.
With mating season here, Mount Diablo State Park and other dry, inland areas are awash in amorous arachnids searching for love, or what passes for it among spiders.
"It's a pretty good year," said Ken Lavin, who has led "tarantula hikes" on Mount Diablo each fall for 20 years. "We've got more than we've had in the past few years."
The spiders are a popular attraction that draws people eager to see an animal that Harry Belafonte immortalized in "The Banana Boat Song" and Clint Eastwood immolated in "Tarantula," the cheesy 1955 horror film about a 50-foot arachnid that terrorizes Arizona.
Tarantulas are big. They are ugly. They have a reputation only slightly better than that of pit-bull terriers. It turns out their bad reputation is entirely undeserved. Although tarantulas are the largest spider in North America, they are, in a word, wimps.
Their bite is no more irritating than a bee sting. They are docile and avoid anything more threatening than a cricket. They are so delicate that falling even a foot can kill them. They have terrible eyesight, making them easy prey for anything bigger than they are.
With the deck stacked so heavily against them, it's no wonder the nocturnal animals spend most of their lives underground, emerging just long enough, and far enough, to snatch passing insects for dinner.
That changes with the waning days of summer, when randy males, which reach sexual maturity after seven years, emerge from their burrows in September and October to search for mates. Even those that manage to avoid being eaten by coyotes or birds or squashed by hapless hikers face long odds against their prospective mates.
Female tarantulas, which can live 20 years or more, occasionally dine on their suitors.
The big, brown spiders tend to take the path of least resistance as they hunt for a mate, preferring to wander along trails and even roads. That makes them relatively easy to spot. Lavin found a big one about 10 minutes into a recent hike through Mitchell Canyon.
"That one's been out for a while," he said, pointing out the spider's skinny abdomen, evidence that it hadn't eaten in a while. Although the spiders will eat if given an easy opportunity to do so, they don't go out of their way to hunt.
When a male finds a willing female, they'll engage in a mating dance of sorts, vibrating and tapping their legs. As they stand face-to-face, the male hooks his spurs into his mate's jaw and lifts her up to inseminate her, then scurries away.
Males will mate as often as they can, and those that aren't munched by a predator, squished by a hiker or squashed by a car will roam the mountain until they die, for a male tarantula never returns to his burrow once he leaves it.
"It's always the end of the line for the males," Lavin said. "It's the last hurrah."
(E-mail Chuck Squatriglia at csquatriglia(at)sfchronicle.com.)
