Tarantula Mating Season Turns Southwest Into Hairy Singles Bar

It’s tinder season—for tarantulas. From late August through October, vast stretches of the Southwest turn into an eight-legged singles bar as male desert tarantulas abandon their burrows, hit the road, and go on what can only be described as a frantic, fang-flashing quest for love.

Think you’ve had awkward dating stories? Try trekking across scorching deserts and grasslands just to meet one woman—only to keel over the morning after. That’s average October for these guys.

According to Dr. Cara Shillington, biology professor at Eastern Michigan University, a male tarantula spends five to eight lonely years underground eating bugs, buffering up his hairy calves, and then—exactly once—pops the existential question to as many females as possible. Miss your shot? Sorry, pal, the curtain drops anyway.

States tuning in to the parade include Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Texas, Nevada, Utah, and even southern stretches of Missouri. In southeastern Colorado the spectacle has become so mainstream that the town of La Junta throws an actual Tarantula Festival, complete with funnel cakes and—presumably—side-eye from every spider who realizes attendance is mandatory.

Don’t panic if one shows up on your porch. Shillington insists the spiders are “more scared of you than you are of them”—a phrase that has comforted exactly zero houseguests since the dawn of arachnophobia. If relocation is required, trap the Romeo under a large container, walk him gently outside, and wish him luck on the singles scene. Swatting, spraying, or hiring tiny DMV workers to revoke his tarantula license isn’t necessary.

Sure, scientists still can’t tell us precisely how far he wanders, or what cosmic force tells him “time to slide into DMs (Desert Modules).” Until they do, let’s just salute the hardest-working paramours on six—actually, eight—legs, and pray our own pickup lines age a bit better than “I literally die tomorrow.”