The photograph Reto brought home
Reto photographed a yellow-and-blue tarantula in Colombia in 2014. He did not collect it. The image was enough to make us want to return, but not enough to name a species.
Back at the site in 2019
Five years later, our group returned to the same broader area and found several spiders with the same general appearance. Different sizes were present, and the animals were associated with retreats along narrow ground features. None showed a defensive display during our short observations. We continue to keep the exact locality private.
Why the quotation marks matter
Pseudhapalopus sp. “Yellow Blue” is a field and hobby label. The World Spider Catalog lists one accepted species in Pseudhapalopus, P. aculeatus from Bolivia, and records questions around that name [1]. The Colombian spiders cannot be placed in that genus from color photographs alone.
What the genus name covers today
The genus name is less settled than the hobby label suggests. Strand described Pseudhapalopus in 1907 from a single male of P. aculeatus from Bolivia [2]. That type material was destroyed during the Second World War, and Nentwig and colleagues declared the species a nomen dubium in 2020 because Strand’s description is too thin to recognise it [3]. A revision the same year proposed it as a species inquirenda, a species of uncertain identity [2].
That matters for Colombian spiders, because the second species placed in the genus, P. spinulopalpus, was described from Colombia in 1997. The 2020 revision argued that many of the features used to place it in Pseudhapalopus came from the Colombian species and not from the type species, and it moved spinulopalpus to a new genus, Spinosatibiapalpus [2].
Colombian relatives and hobby labels
A 2024 paper added two Colombian species to Spinosatibiapalpus, one from the Caribbean coast and one from the Tolima department in central Colombia. Its authors found females in burrows in roadside ravines or under rocks, with silk-lined entrances and leaf litter around them, and they collected the central Colombian male from a burrow in a river bank [5]. Those are described species with their own ranges, and we do not claim that our spiders belong to that genus.
Keeper literature from before the 2020 revision shows the same uncertainty. Esche wrote in 2014 that hobby animals sold as Cyclosternum schmardae are usually an undescribed Colombian Pseudhapalopus species, citing Weinmann (2008), and that the literature then available described no clear way to tell Cyclosternum and Pseudhapalopus females apart without the males [4]. Keeper forums use other informal labels for Colombian spiders, such as sp. Blue and sp. Colombia. Photographs alone cannot show whether any of them is the spider on this page.
From the first photograph to the return visit
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References
- [1] World Spider Catalog (2026). World Spider Catalog, version 27. Natural History Museum Bern. Pseudhapalopus genus record. doi:10.24436/2.
- [2] Gabriel, R. and Sherwood, D. (2020). Revised taxonomic placement of Pseudhapalopus Strand, 1907, with notes on some related taxa (Araneae: Theraphosidae). Arachnology 18(4): 301 to 316. doi:10.13156/arac.2020.18.4.301.
- [3] Nentwig, W., Blick, T., Gloor, D., Jäger, P. and Kropf, C. (2020). How to deal with destroyed type material? The case of Embrik Strand (Arachnida: Araneae). Arachnologische Mitteilungen 59: 22 to 29. doi:10.30963/aramit5904.
- [4] Esche, S. (2014). Bestimmung einer Theraphosinae mit Unterscheidung von Cyclosternum und Pseudhapalopus. Arthropoda Popularis, pp. 18 to 26.
- [5] Bolaño-Manjarres, E. D., Benavides-Rivas, L., Tamaris-Turizo, C. E. and Osorio, L. M. (2024). Two new species of Spinosatibiapalpus Gabriel and Sherwood, 2020 (Araneae: Theraphosidae) from Colombia. Arachnology 19(9): 1205 to 1210. doi:10.13156/arac.2024.19.9.1205.
