USER'S GUIDE

This site arranges the 860 or so current species of the family Theraphosidae by subfamily (Species Specific pages) and divides more general information into a number of subcategories within the categories Captive Husbandry and Natural History. Each subfamily, genus and species name is followed by the author of that taxon and publication year. For those unfamiliar with this protocol, this basically means that, for example, a species name is followed by the surname(s) of the individual(s) that described that species and the year published. If the author used a name that differs at all from the present name the surname and year are enclosed in parentheses. Thus, Poecilotheria subfusca Pocock, 1895 indicates that the species was described by Pocock in an 1895 publication using that exact name, while Poecilotheria fasciata (Latreille, 1805) denotes that Latreille published the species in 1805 using a name that is not currently valid (in this case, Mygale fasciata). Only the author’s surname is used unless it is shared by other workers in the field, which necessitates the use of first initials for differentiation.

For species, the following line states the country or countries where it is found. This information is based on The World Spider Catalog and other sources with some changes or additions.

For every species the first citation represents the publication of that species (this also holds true for the higher taxa: genus, subfamily, family). Other references to that species then follow alphabetically. As the title suggests, this guide is intended for the arachnoculturist or hobbyist. It is not a complete bibliography of all writings on each taxon found in the scientific literature or all synonymies. Instead the taxon description is always provided and additional references are chosen primarily from hobby literature and popular works with the occasional inclusion of papers of potential hobbyist interest from peer-reviewed science journals. As time permits, many more academic/scientific references will be added.

As mentioned above, general articles (those not pertaining to a specific genus or species) are divided into Captive Husbandry and Natural History pages, which in turn are split into a number of categories. A separate Books page is also provided.

In most cases, popular works such as hobby magazines or tarantula society journals are best obtained from the publishers themselves (see Sources page for some links) or by networking with fellow hobbyists. Scientific works can be obtained by consulting your municipal library or, better still, the library of a major university. Through the US interlibrary loan system you will have access to libraries nationwide. These libraries will either ship the journal to your library for loan or send a photocopy or electronic PDF file. There may be fees associated with these requests. Although some articles may be downloaded from other sites (and a few from this site) by clicking on provided links, not every article available online is noted as such here. Use Google or another search engine to search using complete or partial titles or by author name(s). If you find a paper please report the link by clicking here.

Citation Format: Although there are some standard practices followed with regards to article citations, there is no one standard or correct manner of formatting a reference. Different scientific journals, or groups of scientific articles of a specific discipline, have their own standard formats. Here I have chosen to use one I favor that I hope makes references easy to read, and allows them to stand out during a quick visual search. The author(s) and publication year are alone on the top/first line, burgundy colored and set in bold type. The second line is the article title or book name; these two can be differentiated by their format. That is, magazine or journal article titles are not italicized and most words, except for proper nouns (and all nouns in German), begin with a lower case letter. Book names are italicized and most words are capitalized. The final line provides the journal name (italicized and often abbreviated in a manner recognized by libraries), volume, number and page numbers in the case of articles, and the name of the publisher and city of publication in the case of books. The volume and number of a periodical such as a magazine or journal is provided by first the volume and then the number in parentheses with no space between. After the colon are the page numbers covered by the article. In the case of species descriptions (and some other papers), the exact page numbers, figures (f.) and plates (pl.) that describe or illustrate the specific species are provided in brackets. The following examples illustrate first a fictitious species description and then a book:

Author, U.R. 2005.
Scientific article describing a species: Note words beginning with a lower case letter.
Scient. Jour. 9(5): 100-140. [121-122, f. a-e, pl. 1, 3].

Author, U.R. 2005.
The Book About Tarantulas and Bibliographic Citations.
Exotic Fauna Press, Nashville, TN


To summarize, this site provides bibliographic citations of published material related to theraphosid spiders. Articles of interest will need to be obtained by the user. Some citations are accompanied by hyperlinks to downloadable or viewable files online, but the majority must be sought through library requests, publisher contacts or from other enthusiasts. You first should search the Internet, but in most cases contacting a university librarian or interlibrary loan department will be necessary. Please remember that copyright laws protect publications. This site does not condone or participate in copyright violation.


Photos: Photo links are provided for each species where possible. Please note that these photos have not been verified by any taxonomic process and should not be regarded as valid depictions of species. The photo identification represents the best available information, based on photographer and pet trade identification.

  Internal links to photos on this site.
  External links to photos on other websites. Off-site photos are primarily located at excellent tarantula photo galleries like Rick C. West's birdspiders.com, Guy Tansley's giantspiders.com and Martin Huber's spiderpix.com.