South Orange County T's?

[Moose9]

That is a beautiful specimen. I have lived out in the desert N. of Palm Springs Ca. for the last 30 years and have only seen a few blah looking males wandering. My friends and family of coarse see local tarantulas all the time. But when i ask them to catch one for me, they kill them. None of them can stand spiders of any kind. I have a couple of Aphonopelma's, but nothing locally.

 

[Randomhero148]

That is a beautiful specimen. I have lived out in the desert N. of Palm Springs Ca. for the last 30 years and have only seen a few blah looking males wandering. My friends and family of coarse see local tarantulas all the time. But when i ask them to catch one for me, they kill them. None of them can stand spiders of any kind. I have a couple of Aphonopelma's, but nothing locally.

Thats pretty screwed up, hopefully you stoped asking them to catch them for you..

 

[hamfoto]

All I can find for sure is that A. "eutylenum"and A. iodius are different species...

But, all these species are found in SoCal and supposedly look very similar...

A. clarum, A. cratium, A. cryptheum, A. eutylenum, A. iodius, A. phanum, A. radinum, and A. steindachneri(plus a couple other dubious names...)

Of those clarum, cratium, cryptheum, eutylenum, and phanum were all described by Chamberlin in 1940, iodius and radinum by Chamberlin and Ivie in 1939, and steindachneri was described by Ausserer in 1875.

If they all turn out to be the same thing wouldnt they be renamed after the earliest valid description?

So, yes, a bunch of North American T's look the same b/c their morphology is so conserved. A bunch of those names will probably end up being synonymized...though some may in fact end up being valid as well. A. eutylenum and A. iodius so look very similar...but are different valid species. They are both "species complexes"...
A. steindachneri is also a valid species (Prentice paper, 1997?).
Dr. Brent Hendrixson and myself are working on this very problem right now...the western US species problem is my PhD project.

Chris