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For Insects, Spiders & Their Kin
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Photo#413797
Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - male

Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - Male
Lake Tawakoni State Park, Hunt County, Texas, USA
June 18, 2010
Size: ~9mm, excl. chelicerae
Arachnologist Hank Guarisco identified this as Bagheera from a living specimen. Texas A&M lists Bagheera prosper as the only member of this genus found in Texas. We found two at Lake Tawakoni State Park. They are likely common there because we spent little time spidering.

The only other member of this genus is Bagheera kiplingi, recently determined to be a primarily vegetarian spider eating the Beltian bodies of Acacia trees. There were Acacia-like trees at the park, and park staff is getting back to me on the exact species of the tree.

I had trouble getting a good photo because the spider was fast and would not stop moving.

Images of this individual: tag all
Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - male Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - male Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - male Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - male Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - male Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - male Bagheera prosper (Salticidae) - Bagheera prosper - male

BugGuide needs some work
Well, I have all these photos collected together for the same specimen, but BugGuide requires that I change the specimen information separately for each photo. I'm changing "Wills Point" to "Lake Tawakoni State Park" since that's more specific, and I'm unchecking the "adult" checkbox. I'm stopping at the first image.

 
I changed the rest for you...
...

 
Thank you Ron!
Thank you Ron!

 
Yep, that is something that has been suggested...
...in the "Website Problems and Suggestions" forum section. The folks at Iowa State University that keep this whole thing up and running (John Vandyk for one) have been working on Bug Guide "2.0". Not sure when it's coming out or what "upgrades" it will include, but I know the small team there is working very hard on it. You can see some of the other suggestions folks have made if you visit the "forum" tab and go to the topic section that I mentioned above. Lots of people have some good ideas.

Moved
Moved from ID Request.

Wonderful!!
New genus for the Guide! This is the only Bagheera in North America (north of Mexico) and they're only found in TX.

This would be the Dendryphantinae subfamily. I'll make a page for this beaut real quick.

 
Thank you Mandy!
Thank you Mandy!

 
No problem
Thank YOU for the awesome new species for the Guide! Some great images to start off with! I'm done fiddling with the info page for the time being. I think it has enough info to start with.

 
Mandy, I think I labeled this
Mandy, I think I labeled this adult male, but I actually think it's penultimate. I posted all of my in-focus photos.

 
Palps
It's tough to tell. The best palp shot is your third image. You can see most of it there. The palps on this species aren't especially wide or anything, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was adult. But I think I'll take your word for it since you were there in person. The page of Dr. Wayne Maddison's revision that shows the adult male palp is here (fig. 84 & 99).

 
Never mind! I discovered tha
Never mind! I discovered that I could fix it myself.

 
Oh, yeah
Haha, I didn't know that's what you were talking about. Bug Guide takes a bit to get used to. :)

Hey, once you get more comfortable or whatnot, would you ever be interested in becoming an editor here? Spider folk are always needed and wanted here!

 
I'll be ramping up soon
You may want me to be organizing all the photos I'll soon be posting. I've got a ton in the works. I'll be helping Mike Quinn out with his survey of Wild Basin, and I'll be doing my own survey of McKinney Roughs. I'll be photographing everything and Hank will be identifying most of the specimens, which will be stored at UT Austin. I'm trying to resolve my camera problems first.

 
Very nice addition
What a cool looking spider! Mandy - when we have a new specimen with an expert confirmed ID, we are putting a thumbnail in the identification field as a "Voucher specimen". That way we can easily go back and find the images that were identified by an expert. I've been trying to do the same thing with the images Dr. Vincent is providing & there are a bunch from the past that I'm planning on fixing eventually. So much to do and so little time....

 
Voucher -
I like this idea, Lynette, but I just happened to run across it accidentally here. Could this info. be placed in the Editor's Forum? Or did I miss it somehow?

 
Voucher Specimens
No, you did't miss it, but sometimes I just take other editors' ideas and run with them in the spider section. I had been following this discussion and decided it was a great idea for the spider pages to help keep track of expert ID'd images vs. identification by range and habitus.

 
Voucher specimens
Thanks, Lynette! I will remember that in the future. Makes perfect sense and I wish I would have thought of doing that on my own, haha. Glad you caught it. I sort of got excited and hastily made the new guide page without thinking too much.