It's something that's unique.

Mu community has gotten behind it and thought, this is great.

Not everybody, but a a large per The best part to me is people's How much they enjoy it.

How, muc they didn't realize that these animals, that this is a neat are It's been a pretty cool thing to Like, a lot of people from I've heard people from Canada an somebody from Colombia came down now with people from New York and all parts the United States.

So that's pretty awesome.

We come from Lake Palestine which is in East Texas in the Pi Not only are we looking at the we're learning a lot about them.

Wealth of knowledge.

It's it's they're awesome.

It was way worth it.

Yeah.

Way worth it to come out and do To the discomfort of some folks the tarantulas are always here.

I've worked with tarantula for actually a number of years.

and whenever I told people I worked with tarantulas, they'd cringe or you know, make some gross noise.

Anything you can think o just repulsed by the idea of it.

And it was so fun coming here because I tell people I work with tarantulas and they so what?

We see them all the time, they're here on our back porche you know, one that I can show re Yeah.

Want to go over here?

These males are looking for a ma they find a mate and she eats th You know it's like a dinner date, right?

they just keep wandering and ke for a mate, and the cold gets th My research involved coming out I worked at one of th biggest tarantula labs in the wo This was an incredible resourc for us to come out and start stu these animals in their field in, in their natural environment The reason it's called the migration is usuall because these males come out in And in the past we've just seen crossing roads in the thousands.

And so it was mistaken as a true migration.

And so what I dug into was what that pattern, that we see those coming out and looking for a mat all at once, seemingly.

Its kind of half out of the bur And I started correlating i to these drops in temperature.

And what we found is that there' this cold snap almost every Sept right in the middle of it.

And as soon as that happened th I found close to 30 tarantulas.

And then the next day after tha closer to 50 tarantulas, and it And then it started dwindling do we don't know what we don't know but the fact of the matter is is that every time when you star at more and more specifi and niche animals, we start find how important they are to the f the ecosystem, all of these litt My goal in getting involved was to improve education, to he appreciate what we've got here and I also want them to enjoy it and learn something about it.

I think it's such a tight knit c that wants to show what they have to offer to a lot of people, And I think it's really importa for a festival like the festival to exist in a town like La Junt because of the amount of people and how much it puts town in peo minds outside of this region.