Parched earth crunches under our boots as we walk across the eastern Colorado plains. It’s a late September day, and a vast expanse of cracked dirt—dappled with an occasional green spike of yucca and a scattering of yellow-flowering rabbitbrush—stretches out ahead of us. “Found one!” calls out entomologist Jackie Billotte, eagerly beckoning to her colleagues as she pokes at a quarter-sized hole in the dirt with a twig. She’s hoping to lure out the female Aphonopelma hentzi, commonly known as the Oklahoma or Texas brown tarantula, who is in the…
