re: Florida now has new species of venomous spider, looks like a small shiny black tarantula

they're providing updated descriptions for all described species and the 33 new species... tl;dr it's difficult and to date it's all been pretty vague

quote:

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"Much of this material was amassed from a number of collectors and institutions by the late Dr. Willis Gertsch, who spent over 40 years working on a revision of the group. Gertsch never published his work on Ummidia prior to his passing in 1999, but his notes and correspondence, stored in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History proved useful and insightful in the completion of this work. A quote, taken from these correspondences, is possibly the best expression of the difficulty of revising this morphologically homogenous group, “this is the most difficult ctenizid genus I know with such feeble, variable, erratic, aberrant characters that I find myself uncertain as to...what is a species.” With the material available to us, we have done our best to accurately delimit species but openly acknowledge that this work represents a first attempt and that much work remains on this enigmatic, geographically widespread, and notoriously difficult genus of trapdoor spiders.""

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