California (tarantula) Dreaming hifi Video

California has many species of tarantulas. Many, possibly most, are not even described by science yet. I am not sure what this species is, beyond pretty.

In this video my buddy Steven and I use a tarantula recovery technique commonly known as flooding. The advantage to this method over digging is that it is much less invasive than digging, basically leaving the burrow almost immediately available for another animal to live in. Flooding does not always work. If the soil is too porous or the shape of the burrow is wrong you can pour gallons of water down the hole and never have the spider compelled to leave. Another problem with flooding in dry, hot areas is that you have to carry in quite a bit of water... which is heavy and limits the range you can hike to find bugs. This area happens to be several hundred feet (~100-150 meters) from a little stream which allowed us a basically unlimitted water supply.

[uploaded from a ~120MB WMV file]

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SweCorpusD: Sweet looking spider! What species was that?

cacoseraph: unidentified Aphonopelma species

thebugcatcher100: Awesome! Where did you find it? I really want to go searching for some wild tarantulas.

cacoseraph: Northern edge of Rancho Cucamonga, CA, USA been looking for them for ~7 years there... and it took my brother's nonbug gf to find them :/ i very well might be the world's worst bug hunter, heh thanks for watching

thebugcatcher100: Cool, thanks for telling me. Was it a certain hiking trail or something? I'm not that good at bug hunting either. :)

cacoseraph: youtube ate three attempts at a reply :/ i think it is cuz i tried to put a link in it's not named trail, that i know of my local bug group is going to do a hike there tomorrow search for scabies bug club on google and you will eventually get a link to our club

IloveSPIDERZ: It looks like an Aphonopelma species. Hey, Contact Jon3800, I'm sure he probably knows! :)

cacoseraph: meh, i'm suspect of anyone who claims to know CA aphonopelma. the genus is a horrid mess and i suspect at least half the species in CA are yet to be described