Craziest Tarantula Stories

[killy]

Okay, here's mine - many of you have heard it before, but since it's apropos to this thread, I'll tell it again, because I love it

When I was in grade school, living in San Bernardino, I captured a big brown California tarantula, brought it home, set it up in a shoe box, and fed it meal worms, which it devoured with gruesome gusto. Life was good! A couple of days later I got summoned to the principal's office for an emergency call from my hysterical mother. It seems the tarantula escaped inside the house, our cleaning lady had climbed onto the dining room table and wouldn't come down, mom was petrified, in all the hubbub my baby sister was screaming her head of without knowing why - in short, it was a madhouse. Mom compelled the principal to make me come home to re-capture my pet T and rescue humanity RIGHT THEN!

I found it cowering under the living room couch. Dad made me release it back into the wild that afternoon.

Many years later, thanks to this forum and a little research on my own, I discovered that what I had was an Aphonopelma eutylenum, and by its size and its presence above ground, it had to have been an adult male looking for some nookie. So it's a darn good thing dear old dad, without even realizing it, made me do the right thing by letting him resume his quest! :clap:

 

[Xian]

My crazy T story is one that shows just how resilient tarantulas are.
Back in the late 90's I was working as a construction foreman at a concrete company in Iowa. My crew was made up of a few token white guys and about 10 mexicans. In Iowa, we would get layed-off in the winter. All my guys stayed around locally except for one old guy that would take the off season to go back to Mexico. Every year when he came back he would bring me something from Mexico. Well one year he came back empty handed. He asked me if I had gotten a package in the mail. I said No. He seemed confused by this. Well about two or three weeks later, I received a package about the size of a shoe box. The post mark was dated 6 weeks earlier! When I opened the box up, there was no packing material in it. The only things in the box were a handmade snakeskin belt rolled up tight and what looked like a plastic bag. The bag was the type you would buy tropical fish in. And what do you think was in that bag? That's right a tarantula that he had just picked up off the ground or out of a burrow from his homeland. Like I said, there was no packing in the box or air holes in the bag!!! I hurriedly opened the bag and removed the B. emilia and the leg that she lost while in the box with the belt slidding around and hitting her for 6 weeks!!!!

She soon recovered and was my favorite T for many years!

So when you are getting T's in the mail, don't sweat to much about them surviving the trip!

 

[drdoody]

I was about 16 years old and on a long summer vacation with my family when, somewhere in Arizona, Dad stopped the car and told me to get him a drink out of the trailer.

An aside: I never paid attention to anything outside the car. Ever. We could have driven past Godzilla and I would not have noticed. My parents were teachers, so not only did we have the entire summer off, but we would spend most of it driving from historical site to monument to national park. Cool as an adult, not cool as a teenager. So anyway, I had no idea what was transpiring outside the car because I had my face in a book and my headphones cranked to 11.

No, I was not happy to be the one to go get my father his 97th Diet Coke of the day. Nor was I happy to find that I was stepping out into a mass tarantula migration. There were billions of the things out there. Everywhere. And I didn't like spiders in the least, so I literally bugged out and jumped back into the car, slamming the door and shedding my shoes and pants on the way to the back. I didn't have the guts to curse my father openly, but there was a steady stream of Al Swearingen-style profanity rolling around my head for an easy month. Everybody else thought it was hilarious. Later that year, during deer season, I paid my family back in spades when I returned to the camp with a very live, very unhappy 4-foot water moccasin.

As it turns out, not only am I the only member of my family to be frightened by spiders, I am also the only member not frightened of snakes.