Male Tarantula Ends Up as Main Entree in Love Feast : Biology: Safari looks into the deadly kiss of the spider’s woman and other arachnid attributes.

They’re big, they’re hairy and they go out night after night looking for a date. But these aren’t your average mall crawlers.

They’re male tarantulas, amorous arachnids whose social life could give anyone the creeps.

First, the hapless male has to wait eight years before he’s old enough to go looking for love. Then, when the romance is over, it’s really over. The evening ends with the female gobbling up her mate in an efficient, if ruthless, example of prenatal care.

These spider suitors don’t have to buy dinner, they are dinner.

“When you talk to children right around second and third grade, the girls love to hear that,” said Pat McRae, spider expert at the Lindsay Museum.

Normally, the shy spider only comes out at night, but in September and October, the males emerge in the late afternoon and evening, roaming the slopes of Mt. Diablo, about 20 miles east of San Francisco, in search of a good time.

That gives McRae and other leaders a chance to show hikers some male tarantulas while discussing the deadly kiss of the spider’s woman and other arachnid attributes.

While the sight of a six-inch-long spider could give any reasonable person the shivers, experts say there’s not too much to worry about--unless you’re another tarantula.

“The tarantulas on Mt. Diablo are docile,” said Wanda Bishop, program director of the Walnut Creek-based natural history museum.

All of them are poisonous to some degree or another, she said, but the bite of a mellow California variety is less than a bee sting.

In 10 years of tarantula treks, “we haven’t lost a single soul,” she said. “Once in a while a leader gets bitten, so I don’t encourage people to pick up the tarantulas.”

In fact, tarantulas have a lot more to fear from people than vice versa.

“I ride my bike up Mt. Diablo and I see squished tarantulas all the time,” Bishop said.

But if it’s a live-fast, die-young proposition for the males, the wilier females can hang on for a quarter-century. Each spring, they lay hundreds of eggs, a necessary precaution, since few live. For survivors, the key is to get mobile and scatter before they, too, become mother’s little morsels.

“Spiders don’t see too well,” said McRae tolerantly. “If it’s moving, you grab it and eat it.”

In the dating game, sometimes the male tarantula is unlucky enough to meet up with an unusually ravenous female who may put the bite on him before they even get started.

Still, notes McRae, at least the male tarantula has a fighting chance of scurrying away to mate another day. The male praying mantis, on the other hand, can get his head bitten off in mid-act.

Which may explain all that praying.