How tarantulas are journeying across Colorado grasslands – for love

While the rest of the country is gearing up to celebrate everything spooky this Halloween, its Valentine's Day for a group of creepy crawlies making their way across Colorado.

Hundreds of tarantulas are currently moving across Colorado's southeastern plains looking for a mate.

Tarantula mating season has begun, and one city has capitalised on the eight-legged love fest by turning it into a tourist attraction.

La Junta, a city approximately 105 miles from Colorado Springs and with a population of 7,300, is trying to brand itself as the “Tarantula Capital of the World” in hopes those curious about the spiders will make the journey to catch a glimpse of their movements.

The city's tourism director, Pamela Denahy, told NPR that she never imagined the critters would become a tourist draw for La Junta.

Nevertheless, hundreds of people from across the state and neighbouring states have visited to participate in the city's second annual tarantula celebration.

The festivities include tarantula parade floats, costumes, face painting, t-shirts, a human hairy leg contest, an eight-legged race and, naturally, stuffed tarantulas available for purchase.

But the celebration isn't all festivities — the city is also using it as a way to educate the public about the arachnid guests of honour.

Local researchers lead "tarantula treks" out into the land surrounding La Junta to find spiders and give visitors face time with the arachnids.

The male spiders are often found wandering along the side of the roads searching for mates. If they successfully find a female, the males will engage in a sort of ritual, tapping out a rhythm with their legs to attract the ladies out of their burrows.

Once they've finished mating the males may try to flee to find another mate, or they may get eaten by the female. Or both may be eaten by the various predators that see the tarantula mating season as more of an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Coyotes, foxes, snakes, some birds, and the hulking 2-inch tarantula hawk wasps will make a quick meal out of the spiders if they manage to catch them during their annual journey.

The most important lesson handed down to the human visitors to the region are to look, but not touch. Apart from potentially receiving a painful bite, the impact of humans and the climate crisis on the spiders is still not well known, so they are best viewed from a distance or in the hands of a qualified researcher who knows how to protect the arachnids.