Tired of the dating game? Give thanks you're not a male tarantula.
When the romance is over, it's really over. The evening ends with the female gobbling up her mate.These spider suitors don't have to buy dinner, they ARE dinner.
"When you talk to children right around second and third grade, the girls love to hear that," said Pat McRae, spider expert at the Lindsay Museum, which begins its annual tarantula treks this month.
Normally, the big, hairy spider only comes out at night, but in September and October, the males emerge in the late afternoon and evening, roaming the slopes of Mount Diablo, about 20 miles east of San Francisco, in search of a good time.
That gives McRae and others a chance to show hikers some male tarantulas while discussing the deadly kiss of its mate and other arachnid attributes.
While the sight of a 6-inch spider might give you the shivers, experts say there's not too much to worry about - unless you're another tarantula.
All spiders are poisonous to some degree or another, but the bite of a mellow Californian variety of the tarantula is less than a bee sting, said Wanda Bishop, program director of the natural history museum.
In 10 years of tarantula treks, "we haven't lost a single soul," she said.
In fact, tarantulas have a lot more to fear from people than vice versa.
"I ride my bike up Mount Diablo and I see squished tarantulas all the time," Bishop said.
While it's a live-fast-die-young proposition for the males, the wilier females can hang on for a quarter-century. Each spring, they lay hundreds of eggs, a necessary precaution, since few live. For survivors, the key is to get mobile and scatter before they, too, become mother's little morsels.
In the dating game, sometimes the male tarantula is unlucky enough to meet up with an unusually ravenous female who puts the bite on him before they even get started.