Male house spider - Callobius? - Callobius severus

Moved

Moved from Callobius.

… Ken Schneider, 12 December, 2008 - 8:54pm

Moved

Moved from Hacklemesh Weavers.

… Ken Schneider, 9 December, 2008 - 10:06pm

Moved

Moved from Spiders.

… Ken Schneider, 9 December, 2008 - 11:08am

maybe Amaurobius ferox,

From Rod Crawford ~
"The body looks exactly like a Callobius, doesn't it? But the palp is
all wrong. It's in the same family though, Amaurobiidae. I think it's
the introduced European species Amaurobius ferox. At first I had
trouble placing it as an A.ferox because the ventral view of the palp
didn't look right. But then I realized the palp photographed must be
"expanded." (elements rotated into copulatory positions). If you turn
it upside down it lt looks just right."

… Lynette Elliott, 8 December, 2008 - 8:21pm

Thanks!

Thanks Lynette and Rod. I've also posted this on the Canadian Arachnologist's Forum and am waiting for comments there. I'm sure Rod is right though - I will also try to post yet one more distinct view of the palp, since it's so three-dimensional and hard to image for me.

… Ken Schneider, 8 December, 2008 - 9:10pm

Yet more palp photos -

I posted two more photos of a now-detached palp. Would it be possible for Rod to look at this one more time? The long slender tibial apophysis prong looks much more like the Callobius palp figure in the Ubick family key (page 62)than the Amaurobius palp figure? He's probably right, but I'm just not sure...

… Ken Schneider, 8 December, 2008 - 11:56pm

From Rod ~

This is strange. The new dorsal view of the palp tibia
here
looks exactly like Callobius severus, and makes it just about certain
that this is, in fact, a Callobius. When I only had the ventral view
of the palp to go by, I got out an actual specimen of C. severus and
compared it, and they didn't look a bit alike! I just did that again,
and I still can't make the ventral view of the C.severus palp match
seen here
It's as if they were taken of 2 different spiders. Maybe I'm just
being confused by hairs getting in the way and parts being colored
differently, or something. Incidentally, the reason I had to use a
specimen is there are no published ventral views of most Callobius
palps - when Robin Leech did the revision he was a bit lazy with his
illustrations. I hope this will change when Steve Lew (at Berkeley)
now working on the genus, completes his project.

… Lynette Elliott, 9 December, 2008 - 9:25pm

My apologies -

to Rod and others for that first set of palp images - I will frass them - they really are the same spider, though! :) Will move to genus page. If there's a particular view that would allow species-level ID, let me know.

… Ken Schneider, 9 December, 2008 - 10:05pm

Added -

one more shot of the palp - the median apophysis. I was also able to get a look at the figures in Robin Leech's revision (which he also kindly emailed me) and I'm fairly certain this is C. severus.

Several of the excess palp photos will be frassed.

… Ken Schneider, 12 December, 2008 - 8:53pm