On page 137 of the bulletin titled "The Diadematus Group of the Orb-Weaver Genus North of Mexico" by Levi, there is an image of Araneus pima. I was struck by how similar it looks to A. gemmoides. Sure enough it appears to be the result of cross breeding between gemmoides and gemma. I looked through quite a few images in the guide mostly from CA, NM & AZ because I know it's been collected there. I found a few images that closely match the picture in the bulletin of A pima. See
In the bulletin the specimen has two white markings in front of the humps. These white markings are more straight across than diagonal. Brian has already named his Pima, which I can't disagree with. He also has a couple images labeled A. pima on the
www.americanarachnology.org site.
Why is the american arachnology site still using pima? Should we moved these images to illaudatus? Levi says that pima and illaudatus have quite different epigynes and "However, owing to the great size difference and abdominal pattern difference, I remained stubbornly unconvinced that they could belong to the same species until spiderlings from an egg-sac raised by P. Witt grew up into female A. pima and male A. illaudatus. This persuaded me but raised some new questions, as the hand-reared males are larger, the females smaller, than in wild populations". Full text can be seen
here.
This PDF article continues to name A. abigeatus as a new species which was previously called A. illaudatus. So let me try to get this straight. The old illaudatus is the new abigeatus. The old pima is the new illaudatus? So the 1971 descriptions of illaudatus are acutally abigeatus and the 1971 descriptions for pima are illaudatus? Do I have this straight?