Spitting Spiders

[johnharper]

Anyone ever caught any of these? Are fairl common or rare?

thanks,
John

[Bastian Drolshagen]

hi,
yesterday I cought 2 in our flat - Scytodes thoracica. Seems like they´re pretty common in our area

[johnharper]

I live in Georgia in the states so far I have never seen any here where I live. I maybe just out of their range. Have you ever seen any for sale in the pet trade?

thanks,
John

[Bastian Drolshagen]

hi John,
some time ago there were some Scytodes from French Guyana (at least I think so) in the pettrade here in Germany.

[KUJordan]

I went down to Sulphur, OK last fall and found 3 under one rock and no professional arachnologist has been able to key them to species yet! The three of them did well and have provided many in the arachnoculturist community with little ones- it's just that no one knows what species of Scytodes they are!

[8+)]

Well, seems every time I read about spiders, the opening paragraph talks about the low percentage of described species. So, you'd think it wouldn't that far fetched for you to have discovered an undescribed specie!

[Bastian Drolshagen]

well, the fact that nobody is able to ID them to speciesleel doesn´t make in a new species...
If you take a look at WSC there´re 2 species described for the USA:
Scytodes poenitens & S. zapatana.
But that doesn´t mean that other described species can´t occur in the USA - they´re just not described from there.

[8+)]

I never said it wasn't a described specie. I said it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility, although I imagine most newly described species are from tropical rain forests.

[johnharper]

How far does their range extend? Can they be found in Georgia? I have lived in Georgia all of my life so far I have never seen them here.

thanks,
John

[Bastian Drolshagen]

well I guess they´re pretty small and hard to find... I´ve found those two only because they were sitting on a white wall. S. thoracica has a BL of less than 1cm.
I don´t know if Scytodes sp. occurs in your area but the fact that you haven´t seen one so far doesn´t say anything.

[8+)]

As a kid I used to find some in LA (Lower Alabama ;P). This was 30 years ago. I usually found them in the same kinds of places I found Widows. I always found more than one together.

Not sure where you are in GA, but this area is a good deal south of Atlanta. There was a much greater diversity/density of life there than anywhere I've seen in GA, except for the Okefenokee.

[johnharper]

I am in Northwest Georgia around 30 minutes from Atlanta.

thanks,
John