- Joined
- Feb 3, 2008
- Messages
- 240
Well, upto you if you go ahead and breed, but i would suggest your identifications are at best tenuous, and i wouldn't like to see your spiderlings flood into the marked based on that. It is of course really great you looked into how to identify your tarantulas, but im not sure of the experience level of the entomology professor you refer to. He may be awesome at identifying bees or such, but does he have much experience with tarantula identification? As i see it you bought them as unidentified (well "U.S. Desert Tarantulas" to me means unidentified, probably 'Aphonopelma'), and you have no idea where in USA they/their ancestors were collected? That is one of the most critical bits of information that is often vital to make an identification.
In this investigation, did you at any point look at Smith (1994) tarantulas of the USA?
Though outdated now, and much is changing rapidly at the moment in Aphonopelma identification, this is still the best published guide, at least to working out which of his '1994 species' you might be looking at.
Some of the contained information is here:
http://aphonopelma.wordpress.com/category/california/
however, all of it is here:
http://lovetarantulas.com/downloads.htm
Also, how did you look at the specimens? Did you use skins, or did you hold actual live spiders, because some features such as the spines on the coxa of palp and legI are only really possible to see on a whole dead preserved specimen. Basically, you need to remove the entire leg1 and palp from the dead specimen to take a good look at those features.
Just asking, because alot of information on the internet and field guides is complete bunk. They'll say about what they *think* are A.hentzi, A.anax, A.eutylenum, A.reversum, A.chalcodes, or maybe throw in couple of others poorly researched names. Often though its a brown spider from no recorded location that authors often seemingly haphazardly assign to one of those top-choice species names. I'm seeing such problems with online 'crowd-sourcing' websites (e.g. iNaturalist) that try to make taxonomic identifications of photographs based on other mislabeled or unknown photographs, basically if its Texas or East, then its pretty much going to be guessed to be A.hentzi, if its in California it will be guessed to be A.eutylenum, and if its from anywhere in the Americas and black with red abdomen, it will be guessed to be B.vagans.
E.g. http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/133946
Love how there when someone guesses something so random and poorly informed as this, and another uninformed person agrees, then it still becomes a 'research grade' identification. Despite both of them clearly being wrong because Brachypelma certainly dont range so far north..
@Spiderkid, before even thinking to sell spiderlings as A.brunnius, at least please have a good talk to tarantula enthusiasts around Bay Area, California. The species A.brunnius is only from around San Francisco bay area. Im sure there are people on here from there, or there is a local tarantula society there who's members can likely show you what A.brunnius actually looks like, based on specimens collected at/near the original collection locality. Don't loose heart though, i'm greatly impressed you have made the starting steps to properly identify what you have. Many people just vaguely colour match photos, and if it looks superficially similar to that photo of a poorly identified spider, well bingo. That's NOT how to do it.
Looking forward to seeing your pics posted. Glad you took time and care to seek out advice on identification of your finds, and well done for getting people here talking about the native USA species, which can be just as amazing as the foreign imports.
In this investigation, did you at any point look at Smith (1994) tarantulas of the USA?
Though outdated now, and much is changing rapidly at the moment in Aphonopelma identification, this is still the best published guide, at least to working out which of his '1994 species' you might be looking at.
Some of the contained information is here:
http://aphonopelma.wordpress.com/category/california/
however, all of it is here:
http://lovetarantulas.com/downloads.htm
Also, how did you look at the specimens? Did you use skins, or did you hold actual live spiders, because some features such as the spines on the coxa of palp and legI are only really possible to see on a whole dead preserved specimen. Basically, you need to remove the entire leg1 and palp from the dead specimen to take a good look at those features.
Just asking, because alot of information on the internet and field guides is complete bunk. They'll say about what they *think* are A.hentzi, A.anax, A.eutylenum, A.reversum, A.chalcodes, or maybe throw in couple of others poorly researched names. Often though its a brown spider from no recorded location that authors often seemingly haphazardly assign to one of those top-choice species names. I'm seeing such problems with online 'crowd-sourcing' websites (e.g. iNaturalist) that try to make taxonomic identifications of photographs based on other mislabeled or unknown photographs, basically if its Texas or East, then its pretty much going to be guessed to be A.hentzi, if its in California it will be guessed to be A.eutylenum, and if its from anywhere in the Americas and black with red abdomen, it will be guessed to be B.vagans.
E.g. http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/133946
Love how there when someone guesses something so random and poorly informed as this, and another uninformed person agrees, then it still becomes a 'research grade' identification. Despite both of them clearly being wrong because Brachypelma certainly dont range so far north..
@Spiderkid, before even thinking to sell spiderlings as A.brunnius, at least please have a good talk to tarantula enthusiasts around Bay Area, California. The species A.brunnius is only from around San Francisco bay area. Im sure there are people on here from there, or there is a local tarantula society there who's members can likely show you what A.brunnius actually looks like, based on specimens collected at/near the original collection locality. Don't loose heart though, i'm greatly impressed you have made the starting steps to properly identify what you have. Many people just vaguely colour match photos, and if it looks superficially similar to that photo of a poorly identified spider, well bingo. That's NOT how to do it.
Looking forward to seeing your pics posted. Glad you took time and care to seek out advice on identification of your finds, and well done for getting people here talking about the native USA species, which can be just as amazing as the foreign imports.
