Tarantula Sex

A friend of mine who took an entomology class said that one day in class the professor brought in a male tarantula and a female tarantula, dimmed the lights, put on some smooth Barry White, and had the class watch the tarantulas make love.

Whoa baby.

The crazy thing about it, my friend said, was that right after the tarantulas did it, the female tried to chomp the male’s head off! Seriously! That lady spider was just like, “Thanks for the sperm- now I’ll kill you! Chomp!” There wasn’t even any pillow talk or anything.

But the story gets even crazier. This wasn’t a one-time occurrence, this wasn’t a fluke case where the lady tarantula was disgruntled or the lover-spiders had some kind of messed-up past, no, this is a very common occurrence! After sex, female tarantulas try to bite off the male tarantula’s head!

You would think that eventually the male tarantulas would figure out not to have sex at all. You would think they would turn celibate. Or maybe gay.

You would think that the male tarantulas would sit around the web and say, “Hey, uh… I used to have this buddy named Bill, but, uh, he’s dead now because his head got chomped off. Yeah, right after he had sex with this other tarantula lady, the lady just bit his head off. Maybe we should stop having sex, because, if we have sex, we’ll get our heads chopped off. Just a thought.”

But, no, the male tarantulas don’t seem to communicate with each other about these things, they just keep going back for more. It’s like there’s this instinctual drive in them, a biological urge to have sex and reproduce, and maybe they even know what’s coming after the honeymoon recreational activities are over, maybe the male tarantulas know that right after they copulate, the lady they once found so attractive turns into a wicked beast, reveals her fangs, and chomps off their heads, but the male tarantulas, you know, bless their hearts, they just can’t help it.

The males know they’ll only end up getting hurt, but they keep going back for more. Tarantulas are kind of like humans sometimes.

But of course it’s silly to project human emotions onto tarantulas. They’re animals, and we’re humans. They don’t have brains like we have brains. In the words of Kurt Cobain, “It’s OK to eat fish, cuz they don’t have any feelings.”