Aphonopelma_what.jpg

That's not a tarantula. It looks like a mature male California trapdoor spider.

Thank you! I had no idea there were trapdoor spiders that large around. The photo matches are perfect, but he's closer to 3" than to 2", I guess just a really big healthy example. I googled for more than an hour but was clearly searching ineffectively, never once using "trapdoor". I did find photos of A. marxi and A. catalina, and others he resembled. I see that trapdoors are "close relatives of tarantulas," which I also hadn't known. Thanks again for the info!

I walked him up the hill and let him loose in the wedge of trees between properties in the cul-de-sac. He seemed much faster than yesterday.

usually if you see any scientific literature about spiders their sizes are in bodylength, while the rest of us measure them in leg length like normal people

Edan bandoot said:

usually if you see any scientific literature about spiders their sizes are in bodylength, while the rest of us measure them in leg length like normal people

Click to expand...

Good point. When I first started getting into spiders and reading some literature, this was confusing to start with. Keep this in mind for the future.

I noticed that. The exhaustive field guide on aphlonopelma used the body length convention. My experience from Texas is that this guy was as big as small tarantulas, but somewhat more lightly built. But the way the mandables and cephalothorax are put together just screamed "tarantula." As I said, I've never seen a trapdoor spider this big, or heard of one, or even looked closely at photos since I don't believe I'd ever seen one in the flesh before. I've been in California only a short time compared to the decades I spent in Texas. I'd had no idea the small wildlife was so varied out here. In all my time in Texas I saw precisely one solifugid. Here, two already, and bigger. And here, unfortunately, are black widows as big as Texas garden orb-weavers. Very surprising.