‘Males will cover a lot of ground to find females’: New Mexico tarantulas on the hunt this fall
NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – It’s mating season for tarantulas in the United States. Currently in Texas, male tarantulas are on the hunt for a mate. It’s what’s being called a tarantula ‘migration.’
“So, that is the wrong use of that word, actually,” said the curator of Entomology with the ABQ BioPark, Jason Schaller. “It is not a migration, it is a..mating season emergence of males looking for females. And males will cover a lot of ground to find females because the females are very spread out and hard to find.”
Schaller said tarantulas will look like they are migrating because they are all moving in the same direction so they’ll be following the same cues as other males. Where the tarantulas head, he adds, could depend on where the sun is rising, winds, or where the nearest water source is. “A lot of times they’re just moving to move because they have to cover a lot of ground,” said Schaller.
While tarantulas in Texas are out hunting for a mate, New Mexico tarantulas are biding their time. Schaller said New Mexico’s tarantulas will be out and about from August to October.
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If you see a tarantula in New Mexico, it will most likely be the Texas Brown tarantula. The primary tarantula in Texas, conversely, is the Texas Tan and both look very similar. Both species overlap in the central and west Texas area.
In the higher elevations (over 4,000 ft.) of New Mexico, you’re likely to see the Grand Canyon Black tarantula. Schaller said the males tend to be smaller than the Texas Brown with the males having a bluish-black color with orange hairs on the abdomen and the females are chocolate brown in color.
Schaller said once the male tarantulas take two to three years to mature, they only have about a year left. “Male tarantulas, they don’t eat much, they’re just putting all their energy into finding mates. Every time you have this emergence of tarantulas, it’s new tarantulas every year,” he said. He adds there may be a few tarantulas that make it to a second year of mating, but they’re the exception to the rule.
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If you encounter a tarantula around this time, Schaller said they will most likely be skittish. “If you try and pick up a male, he’s just going to try and run away and ‘kick hairs,'” he said. Kicking hairs is a tarantula’s primary defense where almost microscopic hairs with tiny barbs on them from their abdomen shoot out and embed in the skin. For people, it might just be irritating and itchy for a few days where the hairs made contact.
However, Schaller does stress if you want to interact with a tarantula in a calm manner, it’s perfectly alright to do so. “I’m always a proponent of ‘enjoy your time on this earth’ and you can absolutely carefully pick up a tarantula, let it crawl on your hands a little bit, experience it…and basically, you can do no harm doing something like that,” Schaller said.
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