Ischnocolus jickelii: taxonomy, range, and what is documented

Ischnocolus jickelii has a wider cataloged range than most tarantulas featured on birdspidersCH.

Range and name history

The World Spider Catalog accepts Ischnocolus jickelii L. Koch, 1875. It records the species from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and a questioned record from Israel. The catalog marks the Israel record with a question mark. [1]

Related field video from Oman: an Ischnocolus sp. identified to genus only, not confirmed as Ischnocolus jickelii.

Last episode from the Oman trip

Field footage from the last episode of the 2018 Oman trip: Ischnocolus jickelii near the Yemeni border.

Simon described Chaetopelma adenense in 1890. Guadanucci and Gallon treated that name as a synonym of I. jickelii in 2008. Later revisions examined the species and its diagnostic morphology in more detail. [1][2][3] A 2020 study added records from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, discussed the unusual colour polymorphism of I. jickelii, and described a second species, I. vanandelae, from Oman and Iran. [4] For another species from the region, see Monocentropus balfouri. For a western Mediterranean relative in the same genus, a small tarantula of the Mediterranean region, from Spain and Morocco to Turkey, that lives under stones, see Ischnocolus valentinus. Ischnocolus gives its name to the subfamily Ischnocolinae, a grouping whose limits have long been disputed; the Ischnocolinae gallery explains why.

References

1. World Spider Catalog: Ischnocolus jickelii.
2. Guadanucci, J. P. L. and Gallon, R. C. (2008). Revision of Chaetopelma and Nesiergus.
3. Guadanucci, J. P. L. and Wendt, I. (2014). Revision of Ischnocolus.
4. Montemor, V. M., West, R. C., Zamani, A., Moradmand, M., von Wirth, V., Wendt, I., Huber, S. and Guadanucci, J. P. L. (2020). Taxonomy of the genus Ischnocolus in the Middle East, with description of a new species from Oman and Iran (Araneae: Theraphosidae). Zoology in the Middle East 66(1): 76–90.

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