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Photo#485919
Hololena? - Hololena nedra - male

Hololena? - Hololena nedra - Male
Redwood City, San Mateo County, California, USA
January 19, 2011
Size: 8 mm
I found this adult male spider on the wall of our apartment complex. Possibly a Hololena agelenid, mainly because I've found this genus here before, and finally an adult male that I might be able to key out? I'll try to work on this one over the next few days.

This is now CASENT 9096978.

Images of this individual: tag all
Hololena? - Hololena nedra - male Hololena? - Hololena nedra - male Hololena? - Hololena nedra - male Hololena? - Hololena nedra - male Hololena? - Hololena nedra - male

Moved
Moved from Hololena.

Moved
Moved from Hololena nedra.

Comments -
from Rick Vetter, who was kind enough to look at these images (via Devin Carroll), suggest that these spiders are very hard to identify to species, even with the mature preserved spider in hand. I must admit that reading Chamberlin's revision gave me a lot of pause - rather than detailed written descriptions and comparisons of palps and epigyna, he just provides an illustration and doesn't give much of a sense of intraspecific variability or how to differentiate similar species. I'll leave these images here for now, but I think I'll put a comment on the genus page to this effect.

 
And so...?
What does he recommend? Or what do you think we should do? Leave such specimens as Hololena sp.?

-K

Moved
Moved from Hololena.

This seems to be the best fit with the palp. It has also been found in the SF Bay Area according to Chamberlin and Ivie. At least in their paper, it sounds like the markings are similar on all the spiders in this genus and the length of the spiders is quite variable, so palp or epigynum images would perhaps be required for species ID for most of the spiders in this genus?

Not pacifica
These are difficult. I don't think that it is H. pacifica. My present hunch is something along the line of H. nedra (see Chamberlin & Ivie, 1942b). The species has been recorded in your immediately surrounding counties (along with other Hololena species, as well).

Could you possibly shoot a couple more images of the palp (same ventral view), just to see if a bit more detail might turn up?

You might try contacting Devin Carroll, an entomologist in Riverside (if Darrell is too busy): he's posted images of female specimens on BG).

I did find a paper (Kortet and Hedrick, 2004) in which the authors chose Hololena nedra for testing the chemotactile response of juvenile crickets to predators because the species is abundant in their study area (Davis, CA) and commonly found in "grassland and suburban habitats".

 
Thanks, Kevin -
I can't take more shots of that palp for a little while, but (hopefully not to confuse the issue) I've added two more shots of the right palp that I already have - should be the mirror image, I guess.

 
Hololena nedra (my hunch)
Yeah, based on Chamberlin & Ivie, 1942b, I think this is H. nedra.

 
Nice job -
Kevin! The very similar-looking palps in the paper made me give up before I looked carefully through all the figures - that is certainly an excellent match. I'll try emailing Devin Carroll, but I think you're absolutely right.

 
Preliminary reply -
from Devin Carroll, who thinks it is not H. nedra. He's still working on it...

Moved
Moved from Funnel-Web Spiders.

Seems like a good starting po
Seems like a good starting point to me.

-K

 
Thanks, Kevin -
I've added a photomicrograph of the left palp (started with the right, but then saw that the Chamberlin and Ivie paper illustrates the left palps). I'm pretty confident of the genus, and it might be H. pacifica, but I'm not at all confident - a lot of the palp drawings in that paper look pretty similar to me...

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