Caught this one around Phoenix, AZ. This pic is one day post molt and the colors are a lot more drastic than before molt. Can anyone confirm if it's A chalcodes?
I'm not entirely sure, though I know you can't identify a species through an image purely, the color contrast between leg segments is awfully drastic. especially with the blond segments between the dark segments. My A. Chalcodes is pretty uniformly Blond.
new river has been eliminated to A. chalcodes. tbh this looks like a male A. chalcodes as they tend to have much more contrasted leg segments almost black and blonde
See I have Both A. Chalcodes and A. sp. New River and Both have very dark almost black femurs and feet then the rest of the legs are the most stunning blonde. The only thing that really separates the two is the colour of setae on the opisthosoma, on my subadult Chalcodes it is golden blonde and my adult female sp. New River it is brown bronze like in the photo here. Chalcodes usually max out at a bigger size compared to New River too.
This is A. chalcodes. End of story. Sp. "New River" is a made-up name. Some guy was walking around the desert just north of the Phoenix metro area and found some tarantula burrows. He didn't know that they were chalcodes, didn't care either, so he just inserted the name of the town closest to where he was, New River, AZ. He caught all the spiders he could find, selling them as this made-up name, charging more for this "new and rare spider" and just like that, "New River" was born.
Read this recently published paper: http://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=6264
You won't find anything about this made-up species, but you will find that A. chalcodes were collected in New River, AZ
Look at that! The spider shop charges more for the "New River"; what a surprise!
That is one GORGEOUS spider, by the way. The A. chalcodes has always been one of my top favourites... looks wise. I love brown spiders and black spiders.
So this one must be left down to colour forms or something like that then? I just don't understand because both of mine are female yet have noticeable differences. I have seen someone else post up an almost totally blonde AF A. Chalcodes too.
And yes, I see TSS are selling it for an extra £5 must be a shiny.
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