Ryan MacDonnell was volunteering in Limpopo Province, South Africa, when he came across two giant baboon spiders that were anything but itsy bitsy.

The Canadian wildlife biology student was surprised when the smaller of the tarantulas started drumming, or tapping its legs with increasing frequency. MacDonnell, an arachnid aficionado, recognized this as the male’s mating dance and quickly whipped out his camera. (Read "Bondage, Cannibalism, and Castration—Spiders’ Wild Sex Lives.")

“I was really excited,” he says. “We all knew it was something you never see in the wild because, to stumble across it, there’s maybe a five-minute window where a male happens to wander in.”

In the video, the male spider drums and shakes his body before the