Focus on Nature

FOCUS NATURE THE DOCILE AND DELICATE TARANTULA

Bicycling home evenings in late summer, I always stop when I see one stiff-walking across the road and give it a helping hand. I'll admit tarantulas are fearsomely beautiful spiders, and, for a long time, I lacked the nerve to handle them. I'd dismount, search the roadside for a light stick, and prod the spider toward safety. Often as not, though, the frightened arachnid would turn and run right back out onto the blacktop. So I learned how to pick them up and carry them out of harm's way. The guidebooks say tarantulas are placid creatures, not easily angered, and that their bite, rare in any case, is no worse than a bee sting. The experience of my own biology vis-à-vis Nature's biters and stingers is that it's mosquitoes, deer flies, and kissing bugs the bloodsuckers that I had to watch out for, not bees. So if a tarantula bite was no worse than a bee sting, I was ready to risk it, both for the experience itself and to save as many as I could from being squashed under the wheels of speeding cars. Falsely maligned in superstitious old-world folk tales, tarantulas are worth their weight in the grasshoppers and crickets they pounce on and devour. The first one I picked up was a male. I was pretty sure of its sex. In breeding season, roughly from mid-August through September, in my neighborhood, swarms of males hit the road seeking mates. Females, which live 20 to 30 years, about twice as long as males, seldom stray far from their burrows. Males also have thumblike hooks behind their knees for grasping their sex partners, but I hadn't inspected a tarantula closely enough to know that yet. I started by letting the tarantula handle me. Too timid to go unprotected completely, I was wearing fingerless cycling gloves, and simply lay my open hand flat on the pavement and nudged the tarantula onto my covered palm. When I raised it off the ground, the spider scrambled around to the backside of my hand. But when I carefully turned it right side up, it stayed put while I transported it to the roadside where it quickly scampered off into the brush. Since then, I've learned to lift a tarantula by using my thumb and forefinger to clasp its sides between its second and third pairs of legs. In this way, the spider can't bite if it is frightened or riled and there's less risk of my dropping it. For all their dreadful appearance, tarantulas are fragile creatures, easily killed in a fall of only a few feet. Once in the palm of my hand, I've discovered, many of these hairy giants are content to nestle easily there. After the second or third carry, I even got rid of the wimpy gloves. I haven't been bitten yet. Gentleness is the key. Rough handling or abrupt movement may injure or alarm the animal and make it bite. Of course, picking up tarantulas is not for everyone. Some people are allergic to the hairs that tarantulas scrub off their abdomens with their hind legs to fling in the faces of predators. A friend who's a bit arachnophobic will not touch them, but when she sees a tarantula crossing the road, she parks her car and detours traffic until it's safely across. A onewoman tarantula safety patrol, you might say.