About a month ago, the local media hyped a clickbait story about an annual tarantula mating migration through Oklahoma.
For example:
Yep, you heard that right! Lock your doors and shut the windows – hundreds of tarantulas are about to migrate through Oklahoma this fall, which according to my crack math, equates to one for every 350 square miles.
Knowing the odds of seeing an actual tarantula in Oklahoma are incredibly small, I guess you can’t blame Channel 25 for excitedly sharing a picture of one that a viewer sent to them. The only problem – it wasn’t a tarantula.
The channel’s Facebook commenters, those beacons of wisdom and unsolicited advice, quickly corrected the station and pointed out they were actually sharing a picture of a common wolf spider. Instead of just deleting the post and pretending it didn’t happen, Channel 25 did the unthinkable—they edited and updated it!
Yes, in a rare moment of humility, they admitted to their arachno-folly. Nice!
Listen. I’m not going to be too critical of the KOKH viewer and/or the channel’s Social Media Bandits for not knowing the difference between a wolf spider and a tarantula.
From hosting 1,000 trivia nights in my life, I’ve learned that most people are kind of dumb, and I doubt most people know the difference between the two. I mean, it’s not like everyone’s mom has a pet tarantula like mine does.
Wait. What?
Yeah, a couple of years ago, one of my brothers gave my mom a real-life tarantula for her birthday – a fact that I really wish I was making up. It lives in a glass terrarium in her bathroom.
Now, almost every time I take my daughter to my parents' house, we get to go look at Fluffy the tarantula, and I get to think to myself – ”WTF? My mom owns a tarantula!” To make matters worse, I apparently live close to the cricket store, so every time my mom goes out to buy food for Fluffy, she drops by because she’s “in the area.”
Anyway, I guess if you see any tarantula, send me a pic and I’ll see if my mom wants to buy Fluffy a friend. If you see a wolf spider, just send it to a news station and they’ll share the pic with their audience for you.
Stay with The Lost Ogle. We’ll keep you advised.
