Nearctic Arachnologists' Discussion ~ View topic

Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1065 Location: Berlin, Germany

The Howell/Jenkins Spiders of the Eastern United States offers a lovely introduction to the most common spiders to be found in eastern North America. With its many color photographs and clear descriptions of habitat and behavior, it's also a useful starting point for identifying species, allowing one to quickly narrow down the family, perhaps genus, and sometimes even species -- even though the authors caution that it is not a guide to determination. "BugGuide on paper" is what I call it.

I am wondering, though, if there might be an error in the caption of the image on page 263, which identifies the specimen pictured as "a female Castianeira amoena". Kaston describes this species as having "white hairs scattered ... on the anterior half of the dorsum, and laterally between the black bands" and also annulate legs.

The image the authors used looks more like what Kaston describes as C. gertschi ("carapace bright orange with a thin black marginal line ... abdomen [having] two transverse white stripes ... and orange on the anterior half but becoming [increasingly] darker toward the posterior end")

I've not looked at many of these, so any other words of wisdom would be welcome. Below is a recent specimen found near Durham of what I believe to be C. gertschi (or possibly trilineata -- Kaston says they are very close in appearance). This specimen looks very much like what is pictured by Jenkins/Howell with the label C. amoena.

Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1065 Location: Berlin, Germany

I received a very nice e-mail back today from Prof. Howell. He writes "You are exactly right, the spider on p. 263 of our spider book is not Castianeira amoena. I believe that you are right in that it is C. gertschi ... many thanks for pointing that out so that in future editions we can correct that error."

He hints that there might be another such error or two in the book (well, what book is free of such), so keep your eyeballs peeled. Perhaps he should do the same as Donald Knuth does (good company -- father of computerized typesetting and author of "The Art of Computer Programming") and offer a reward (now $2.65) for each error found. Wink

In any event, it was reward enough that he kindly responded and confirmed this.

-K

P.S. -- Someone else also suggested that my specimen above might be C. trilineata. Time will tell, as I've got the literature and the specimen here, which I'll perhaps have time to look at next week.