Mount Diablo tarantula

Each fall the tarantulas come out on Mount Diablo to mate. We saw a couple this year and read about a couple of cyclists — Mt. Diablo is popular with high-endurance mountain bikers — who got so distracted by a pair of mating tarantulas that they crashed into each other and had to be hospitalized.

It looks like this fellow might have been captured and taken home by someone. But what do you do with your tarantula after you get him home?

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2 Comments

  1. tarantulas! Eeeekkkk…..flee. I hate those hairy buggers. We used to live in Trinidad and the damn things were all over the place. My brother (who was little at the time) love to stomp on them and we could hear him happily yelling “bug, bug, stomp, stomp” all over the house. My parents were frightened that he would get bitten but he never did. In any case, after a while, we didn’t have any tarantulas in the house. Either he killed them all or the Tarantula Information Front passed the word out that there was an aggressive boy in “that” house who would stomp your ugly self into a thin black smear.

    I still shudder thinking of them. Scorpions to and nasty red ants and poisonous toads. I do not love the tropics.

  2. it’s male of Aphonopelma sp. … Native US tarantula, I think it came from wild. There are about 200 Aphonopelma species in North America 🙂