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Poecilotheriinae is a tarantula subfamily with a single genus, Poecilotheria, the ornamental tarantulas of India and Sri Lanka. The World Spider Catalog accepts 15 species: seven recorded only from India, six only from Sri Lanka, and two, P. hanumavilasumica and P. vittata, from both.¹ The photographs below show 13 of them, among them P. formosa, P. regalis, P. metallica, P. ornata and P. rufilata. Captions give sex and locality, and credit the photographer where one is known. Most of the photographs show animals in the wild. Two are hybrids from the hobby trade (P. miranda × P. tigrinawesseli) and are labelled as such.

Eugène Simon proposed the genus name in 1885 as a replacement for Scurria C. L. Koch, 1850, a name already taken by a mollusc. The type species, P. fasciata from Sri Lanka, was described by Latreille in 1804.²

Where the genus belongs in the tarantula family tree has been argued for a long time. Simon gave it a subfamily of its own in 1892. Most later authors placed it in Selenocosmiinae because of their stridulatory organs. DNA data changed that picture. In a six-marker analysis, Lüddecke and colleagues (2018) found three Poecilotheria species in one clade with the Indian Thrigmopoeinae and the Southeast Asian Ornithoctoninae, well away from Selenocosmiinae.³ A transcriptome study by Foley and colleagues (2019) again placed the genus next to Ornithoctoninae, and reinstated Poecilotheriinae as a subfamily.⁴ Foley et al. call for a more detailed revision based on more species,⁴ and Lüddecke et al. leave open that the genus may eventually belong in Thrigmopoeinae instead.³

Poecilotheria species by country

• India: P. formosa, P. metallica, P. miranda, P. regalis, P. rufilata, P. striata, P. tigrinawesseli
• Sri Lanka: P. fasciata, P. ornata, P. rajaei, P. smithi, P. srilankensis, P. subfusca
• India and Sri Lanka: P. hanumavilasumica, P. vittata

The distribution of the genus is centred on the forested hills and plains of peninsular India, with Sri Lanka as the second area; reliable records thin out quickly north of the Tropic of Cancer.² P. formosa is common in the southern half of the Eastern Ghats, and P. tigrinawesseli was described in 2006 from the northern foothills of the Eastern Ghats near Visakhapatnam.²

Additional links & references

• World Spider Catalog (2026). Poecilotheria Simon, 1885, species list and distributions. Natural History Museum Bern. wsc.nmbe.ch/genus-detail/3592. Accessed 1 October 2026.
• Smith, A. M. (2006). A new species of Poecilotheria from northeast peninsular India (Araneae, Mygalomorphae, Theraphosidae) with notes on its distribution and conservation status. Journal of the British Tarantula Society 21(3): 83-94.
• Lüddecke, T., Krehenwinkel, H., Canning, G., Glaw, F., Longhorn, S. J., Tänzler, R., Wendt, I. & Vences, M. (2018). Discovering the silk road: nuclear and mitochondrial sequence data resolve the phylogenetic relationships among theraphosid spider subfamilies. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 119: 63-70. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2017.10.015
• Foley, S., Lüddecke, T., Cheng, D.-Q., Krehenwinkel, H., Künzel, S., Longhorn, S. J., Wendt, I., von Wirth, V., Tänzler, R., Vences, M. & Piel, W. H. (2019). Tarantula phylogenomics: a robust phylogeny of deep theraphosid clades inferred from transcriptome data sheds light on the prickly issue of urticating setae evolution. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 140: 106573. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2019.106573
• Overview of Poecilotheriinae at Tarantupedia: tarantupedia.com/poecilotheriinae

Explore this site

For the broader family, see the Theraphosidae overview. You can also browse the Tarantula Gallery, or the Selenocosmiinae gallery, the subfamily Poecilotheria used to be placed in.

Related pages

• Are Tarantulas Poisonous?, including the venom research on Poecilotheria regalis

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