I see that you and John and Jane have moved a bunch of these northwestern Platycryptus to californicus. Is there a way to tell them apart from undatus, or is the range different? I'd like to be able to tell them apart too. Thanks.

so just in case they turn out to be incorrect, I'm the one to blame.

Range appears to be a good indication for undatus, so I used Mike Boone's search page to quickly find all the possible californicus and arizonensis images to be examined.

The most notable difference I can see between undatus and the other two species is the chevrons along the dorsal abdominal midline are generally wider in undatus, and their width varies greatly from the largest ones in the middle to the smaller ones towards the anterior and posterior ends. So, compare yours above with this rather clearly marked undatus:


Also, I just took a quick look through undatus and noticed that most (or maybe all) have white "cheeks", or white scales ventral to the eyes on the sides of the carapace. This doesn't appear to be the case with arizonensis and californicus. Those characters, along with range, should make it easier to pick out undatus from the rest. Note there are a handful of images in undatus that don't belong there.

The bigger difficulty (for me anyway) is californicus vs. arizonensis. The californicus ID'd by Crawford here looks identical to most of the others I just moved, several of which are clearly out of range for arizonensis. And the remaining images that I feel are probably arizonensis are definitely different from yours. However, in some ways they all appear to be the exact opposite to the descriptions and drawings by Barnes in his 1958 revision.

So at this point I'm going to finish up by moving the probable arizonensis images, add published ranges to their respective guide pages, and then see if I can get G.B. Edwards to confirm my work. I believe he is still doing some extensive work with other Marpissinae and may be able to lend a hand in case I totally screwed things up.

BTW, I don't know how you feel about "collecting", but if you want, you are more than welcome to send me any adult jumpers if you want positive ID's. You're bound to have more new ones for the guide out there, and I would love it if we had at least one "phototype" series of both genders with accompanying genitalia images for each info page. Kind of like what I did with proterva. Your habitus photos are certainly good enough for this.

I'm really not much of a collector, but I might give it a try. I may not be so good at catching the little guys, since I've never really tried before. If you would like either this species or the zebra spider I can get those at any time. Just let me know.

I didn't totally screw things up, but it looks like the three jumpers I placed in arizonensis are actually californicus. GB also looked through the californicus images and those all looked fine.

I usually have tons of zebra jumpers out here, especially in the spring and early summer, but a californicus or two would be great if you can spare them. I'll drop you an e-mail.