Love bites: Male tarantulas risk it all in Colorado's wild crawl

AccuWeather

Tarantulas are on the prowl in Colorado...and no, that roadside spider is not real. AccuWeather's Tony Laubach joins the hunt, boots on and laughs ready, for La Junta's wild and fuzzy mating season.

Transcript

00:00Out on the prairies of southeast Colorado where I'm normally chasing tornadoes but today we're

00:05chasing tarantulas. A sighting! We get out to look at our first of the day but...

00:12This one turned out to be a plastic prank left along the roadside but fortunately the real ones

00:25were not far away. I'm not a big spider fan so that's why we're the tall boots. They don't want

00:31nothing to do with us just like I don't want anything to do with them. Fake or not, each fall hundreds of

00:37male tarantulas leave their burrows in search of females. It is not a migration. It's a mating

00:42expedition. Known as Colorado brown tarantulas, they thrive in these grasslands. We've got here

00:49is beautiful short grass prairie out here on the grasslands and a lot of undisturbed land

00:54and the spiders just love it. This is tarantula paradise. And in this paradise this time of year

01:02it is mating season as the males go on hunt for female mates even if it is the last thing they do.

01:08Sometimes they don't make it away. Sometimes the females will actually consume the male. For locals

01:17the experience is worth sharing with visitors from all over the country. It's truly a natural phenomenon.

01:23see them in their natural landscape. We feel like we've done a really good job of narrowing down

01:30the right location in the right time that we can almost of course we can't guarantee but that we can

01:36almost guarantee you will see a tarantula out in the wild. And most likely they'll be a little bit

01:41more real than this one. It's awesome to just come up and see them. In La Junta Colorado for

01:47AccuWeather I'm meteorologist Tony Laubach.

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