LOL! I can't say I've ever heard of a Florida Barking Spider either..Barking spiders?
I thought that was just a joke my stepdad used to play on us...
He'd fart and be like, "Did you hear that? A barking spider..."
bit of interesting info.
all credit goes to Grant from thegreenscorpion.
"When the Europeans began to settle the "New World" the name tarantula was already accepted as the name given for the large southern European wolf spiders and the first Tarantula as we know it from the family Theraphosidae was brought to scientists attention in 1705 when Maria Sibylla Merian presented a painting in her book on the insects of suriname , this painting was of a pink-toe tarantula eating a hummingbird . The Latin genus for this sp. is Avicularia (Avi-= bird ; -cularia = eating) Bird-eating spider was a name adopted by British naturalists way back in 1866 after the book "A naturalist on the river Amazon" by the English naturalist " Henry Walter Bates" depicted a pink-toe eating a sparrow along with the picture from Maria Sibylla Merian`s book and thus seperating these big hairy spiders from the wolf spiders of southern Europe (Lycosa tarentula) that were at that time called tarantulas .
So you see by calling all of the large hairy spiders we know as tarantulas "bird-eating spiders" we are infact implying they are all Avicularia sp. of which they are clearly not . Our large hairy theraphosids "tarantulas" are infact "whistling/Barking" spiders and the name "bird-eating spider" has simply been carried over from when European settlers to Australia first discovered these spiders and since they new these spiders as "bird-eating spiders" the name has simply stuck with the spiders till the present day ."
See, this is why I love the AB so much!bit of interesting info.
all credit goes to Grant from thegreenscorpion.
"When the Europeans began to settle the "New World" the name tarantula was already accepted as the name given for the large southern European wolf spiders and the first Tarantula as we know it from the family Theraphosidae was brought to scientists attention in 1705 when Maria Sibylla Merian presented a painting in her book on the insects of suriname , this painting was of a pink-toe tarantula eating a hummingbird . The Latin genus for this sp. is Avicularia (Avi-= bird ; -cularia = eating) Bird-eating spider was a name adopted by British naturalists way back in 1866 after the book "A naturalist on the river Amazon" by the English naturalist " Henry Walter Bates" depicted a pink-toe eating a sparrow along with the picture from Maria Sibylla Merian`s book and thus seperating these big hairy spiders from the wolf spiders of southern Europe (Lycosa tarentula) that were at that time called tarantulas .
So you see by calling all of the large hairy spiders we know as tarantulas "bird-eating spiders" we are infact implying they are all Avicularia sp. of which they are clearly not . Our large hairy theraphosids "tarantulas" are infact "whistling/Barking" spiders and the name "bird-eating spider" has simply been carried over from when European settlers to Australia first discovered these spiders and since they new these spiders as "bird-eating spiders" the name has simply stuck with the spiders till the present day ."