Sexing damon medius

[mantisfan101]

So did a bit more research and found out that damon medius also has this thing called an operculum flap. I saw a couple videos and pictures of a confirmed female with this flap and no little patch of red hair. Can someone please clarify to me the definitive way for sexing medius?

 

[Sikalisko]

Could you give links to those videos and pictures? I'm interested in what anatomical part that operculum flap might mean. Is is ventral sac covers, or something else?

Ventral sac covers would be used to identify the animal belonging to Western-African group of Damon genus but both sexes have it though.

After reading few scientific articles and few informative websites (like http://www.panarthropoda.de/indexen.php), I'm pretty sure the reddish hair patch around the posterior margin of genital operculum is pretty much the only somewhat easy way to tell the sexes apart for D. medius. I made a thread about sexing my D. medius whipspiders few months ago with pictures showing each animals' private parts (very sexy stuff, I recommend checking them out ).

Other definite way would be seeing a female carrying its egg sac. That means it's a female

After photographing my own animals I can say that those hairs aren't that conspicuous from every angle and lighting condition. I ended up needing to prepare bright light coming from below to be able to take those photos. And some looked like they weren't clear cases at all until observing from the posterior ventral angle (around 45 degrees, that's why many of the pictures were taken from around this angle).

Also, it's be possible that the hairs might be obfuscated by dried up dirt or dust. I've seen pics of some specimens that were quite dirty underneath.

 

[mantisfan101]

I find that flashing a bright enough light is sufficient. I saw a post on instagram with a female that looked more like a male and I couldn’t see the patch of red hair but the poster confirmed it as female. Here’s a pic of mine for reference; I find that a phone flashlight is enough-

 

[Sikalisko]

Chances are that that person on instagram is just mistaken. Not every pet keeper is an expert and they might just believe what the pet store has told them. I've seen few misidentified whipspider species on instagram, and on youtube as well. (The common D. variegatus vs D. diadema and D. diadema vs D. medius confusion is still going strong in those places.)

Yours is clearly a female. And that is clear enough photo to be sure. In my case, I just preferred not to stress my animals by holding them between my fingers and I chose to photograph them trough a sheet of glass and hold them in place with transparent 5dL plastic mug instead. Flash light caused reflections so I couldn't use it.