RAINS RAISE TARANTULA SIGHTINGS

By Miriam Raftery

Photo: National Park Service

August 5, 2017 (San Diego) – If you suffer from arachnophobia, you may not like this story.  Those winter showers have brought out more than May flowers. The wet weather has also led to an increase in tarantula sightings locally due to plentiful populations of critters on which these giant spiders feast.

Tarantulas are turning in some unlikely places, as they roam the region seeking partners during mating season.  A Scripps Ranch resident found one of the huge spiders on her kitchen counter, Fox News reports.  NBC reports that an Escondido man went to slip on a shoe in his garage when his foot felt something fuzzy—a tarantula curled up inside.

Carrie Lewis Smith of Alpine posted on Facebook, "There was a tarantula right outside our back door the other night. He wasn't that big, but still freaked me out. I was afraid he would crawl in through the dog door."

Nancy Dennis, another Alpine resident, replied, "We did have one in our family room that must have come in through the doggy door. I just scooped him up in a waste paper basket" then took the big spider outside. She told East County Magazine that she has also seen a tarantula in Spring Valley. Both Alpine women suggested such sightings are so common in East County that they didn't think this was newsworthy after seeing the NBC news report.

Tarantulas are usually docile, and are sometimes kept as pets. But they can inflict a painful bite – though they are not poisonous to humans.  They do, however, inject mall amounts of venom that paralyzes their prey, which enables them to eat not only insects, but in the case of larger tarantulas, also small lizards, frogs, mice or even rats.

An amorous male tarantula can roam up to four miles in search of a mate, so don’t be surprised if you spot on a local hiking trail – or maybe even in your own backyard., since they’re found across San Diego’s inland region. 

The San Diego Zoo, in a blog post titled, “They’re big, they’re hairy, but are they scary?”  reveals that tarantulas, though formidable looking, aren’t aggressive and generally won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.

They are the biggest spiders in the world- and they’re voracious! They’re called baboon spiders in Africa and hairy spiders in South America. Some local tarantulas can be the size of a human hand. The largest tarantula in the world, called the Goliath, measures a full nine inches across.

As for those wandering male tarantulas, once they find the female of their dreams and mate, their fates are doomed. Male tarantulas die shortly after mating, but females can live up to 25 years – and lay up to a thousand eggs, perpetuating plenty of future generations of those big, hairy spiders in our region.