The story of the Costa Rican Zebra Tarantula

Andrew Smith’s Tarantula Journal
Entry: January 2013
The story of the
Costa Rican Zebra Tarantula,
Aphonopelma Seemanni
One of the most popular downloads at
the end of last year was Michael
Jacobi’s In Search of Costa Rican
Tarantulas, a documentary, which if I
was a writer of a philosophical bent – I
would say catches the zeitgeist of
tarantula collecting. In other words, for
sixty minutes you will find yourself
absorbed in raw sweaty footage, which
gives you a good idea of what it is like
to work in the field - collecting and
photographing tarantula spiders in their
natural habitats.
In the documentary Michael describes
the finding of a large number of Central
American tarantula spiders - but what
we are going to do this month is ignore
the many and focus on just one of those
spiders. We are going to tell the story of
the type specimen of Aphonopelma
seemanni – from its historical discovery
in 1847 – to eventual posterity in a spirit
jar in the Natural History Museum
(South Kensington). And if one is to
embark upon such a tale - what better
story to tell, than that of the Costa Rican
Zebra Spider, which I must admit has
always been a spider that has tickled my
fancy and – I may add - was one of the
very first to appear (thirty years ago) in
both the British hobby and my own
personal collection.
The story of Aphonopelma seemanni
does not begin in Costa Rica – but in
Kew Gardens – London. In July 1846 –
Sir William J. Hooker, the Director of
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The Royal Botanical Gardens received
an urgent message from the Admiralty
that the naturalist on the Royal Naval
survey ship HMS Herald had been killed
in an accident – and that a replacement
was urgently needed. Fortunately for
those of us interested in spiders – a
and possibly Brachypelma emilia. Note
my hesitancy - as the providence of
Brachypelma emilia is not entirely clear.
young German botanist Berthold Carl
Seemann (1827-1871) was kicking his
heels around Kew waiting for an
assignment. I say fortunately – as these
young naturalists were primarily on
board to study the flora and geology of
the countries they visited and ascertain
if the minerals and botanical fauna of
the region were of economic
importance. But some of them were
interested
in
collecting
spiders.
Seemann’s
predecessor,
Thomas
Edmonston, seems have collected few
spiders – but Berthold Seemann
collected both Aphonopelma seemanni
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I am still investigating - as I have never
been happy by the fact that the type
specimen of Brachypelma emilia is
labelled as having been found in
Panama.
In other words Berthold Seemann
appears to have been uncertain where
Brachypelma emilia was actually
collected - and Brachypelma emilia is
hardly the sort of spider that one would
forget in a hurry! So did Edmonston
collect it, before accidently losing his
life in a firearms incident – and did
Seemann find it (possibly unlabelled),
when he came aboard the Herald in
January 1847?
All of which, has distracted us from my
history lesson. Remember - the British
Empire was first and foremost a
dynamic trading bloc – and the
exploitation of plants (think rubber,
quinine, jute cotton, tea, coffee, cocoa)
were deemed, from the very earliest
days of Empire, to be of vital economic
importance. Bugs were not. In fact it has
always fascinated me that despite
having an agenda imposed from high,
which focussed on the importance of
collecting and cataloguing botanical
specimens of commercial value – many
of these young naturalists came home
(and many remained in graves in far off
lands) laden with so many boxes of
skinned birds, mammals, jars of
preserved
reptiles,
amphibians,
arachnids and trays of dried insects –
that the scientists of the day could not
keep up with them. Aphonopelma
seemanni for example remained in a jar
of alcohol in the British Museum and
later the Natural History Museum for
almost fifty years before it was
described.
As an aside, the names of the young
ships naturalists - who came home laden
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with biological booty and made their
reputations by publishing worthy but
readable books about the ships voyage reads like a Who’s Who of the great
Victorian biologists of the day. Figures
like Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker,
John MacGillivray, Thomas Huxley; all
were early on in their careers - ships
naturalists.
Berthold Seemann arrived in Panama in
September 1846, only to discover that
HMS Herald had put to sea again, so he
spent the remainder of the year
collecting on the isthmus – before
finally embarking in January 1847,
when the ship returned from the Straits
of Juan de Fuca.
EXPLANATION:
NAVAL ILLUSTRATIONS
The image of the ship at sea is HMS
Rattlesnake, the sister ship of HMS
Herald. Unfortunately the only known
image of the Royal Naval Survey ship,
HMS Herald is an illustration in the
first volume of Berthold Seemann’s
two volume account titled - Narrative
of the Voyage of HMS Herald 18451851. The image depicts the ship and
her tender in the Baring Straits –
undertaken when she was searching
for the missing explorer Admiral
Franklin, who had disappeared
searching for the North West Passage.
With Berthold Seemann safely on board,
the ship could then continue her original
task of surveying the Central American
coastline for the purpose updating
Admiralty charts. Why? Because the
primary reason for drawing up detailed
and accurate naval survey charts was for
the twin purposes of facilitating both
trade and projecting the power of the
state – which, in this case was the most
powerful trading economic union the
world had ever seen – The British
Empire. In other words if you have to go
to war in the region - or undertake
commercial espionage (example: the
illegal acquisition of rubber trees) – you
have the maps to effectively undertake
the dirty deed.
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A safe anchorage also meant a sail
could be lowered overboard for safe
bathing.
Even the North American coastline was
quietly surveyed!
Thus, as you can imagine, if one is
engaged in the task of busily mapping
the coastline of somebody else’s country
– discretion was generally a good idea!
There are a number of embarrassing
cases where His/Her Majesty’s Consuls
and even Ambassadors had to retrieve
young ships officers and even ships
naturalists from incarceration.
Unfortunately, Seemann has not left us
with a description of the finding and
physical collection of the type specimen
of Aphonopelma seemanni but we can
surmise that as the type collection site
(Puerta Culebra) is just above the bay of
Bahia Culebra - this is where HMS
Herald dropped anchor. Even today the
area is quiet – and one hundred and
sixty years ago the bay would have been
a perfect place for the survey ship to rest
and re-provision away from prying eyes.
Within hours of anchoring an officer and
a party of marines would have made
contact with a nearby village to arrange
fresh provisions (paid for in gold) and if
the area was judged safe – Berthold
Seemann would have been given
permission to search the surrounding
hills for plants, minerals and anything
else, which took his fancy. We can thus
imagine – after a good breakfast Seemann scrambling down the boarding
nets into a pitching ships boat, which
would have been filled with nets,
baskets - and a small shore party, made
up of the sailors who had been tasked
with the role of assisting him in his
endeavours. All of these sailors would
have been armed with muskets and
pistols – but the marksman in group
would have been armed with a musket
primed with bird shot for bagging
ornithological specimens. For a good
idea of what these ships and crews were
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like – check out the film Master &
Commander starring Russell Crowe.
Although it is set 50 years before
Seemann’s voyage – not much had
changed over that period for a British
sailor.
We have no idea, who found the type
specimen – Berthold Seemann or a
sailor attached to his party. If it was
Seemann, it was probably because he
spotted a burrow on the path - leading
up from the bay to the village of Puerto
Culebra. The tarantula burrows in these
embankments are very noticeable – and
if the sky is overcast, the spider can
often be found out of its burrow in the
afternoon. Or the spider could have been
pointed out to the shore party by the
local village children – who would have
been pestering the sailors from the
moment they came ashore.
As a field collector myself, with over
thirty years of experience - I can easily
imagine Berthold Seemann on his knees,
beside a burrow watching a child
demonstrate the art of tickling the spider
with a stalk of grass. And we know from
other sources that children in Mexico
were extracting tarantulas by bobbing.
This entailed embedding a pellet of soft
wax or gum around a knot at the end of
piece of string and dropping it down a
spiders burrow and then bobbing the
pellet up and down. When the tarantula
seized the pellet, the spider could then
be gently teased out of its hole. For
those who doubt this - we have
discovered that you can do something
similar by using long steel tweezers with
soft rubber tipped ends.
Once the spider has seized the soft
rubber tip of the tweezers they often
hang on, until drawn out of their hole to be bagged.
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One hundred and sixty years after
Berthold Seemann scrambled down the
black and yellow painted oak and teak
planked sides of HMS Herald, Paul and
Mark Carpenter, Michael Jacobi and
myself drove down Highway-6 and
turned onto the Pacific Highway, which
runs north of the bay of Bahia Culebra.
Within an hour or so we were bundling
our bags into the Hotel Capazuri – and
after dinner wandered into the grounds
and within minutes had found a number
of Aphonopelma seemanni burrows –
although ironically the habitat we found
more burrows than anywhere else, were
on the rich green embankments – which
were essentially the front lawns of the
local homeowners. Here well watered
tropical
grass
lawns,
rich
in
grasshoppers proved an ideal micro
habitat for particularly well fed and
plump seemanni’s.
in his classic publication – The
Tarantula (to download a pdf copy of
this book see our Homepage on
lovetarantulas.com). I was thus greatly
amused to find hundreds of burrows
along this stretch of the road in private
gardens. What is apparent is that this
spider is opportunistic and adaptable.
Normally we are looking at a vertically
obligate burrow constructed from
scratch by the spider on gently rolling
terrain. This can range from open grass
scrub forest, meadows and grazed
pasture land - but a much favoured
abode – as with all fossorial theraphosid
spiders, is a roadside or track
embankment. This is attractive in that it
I have only read of one enthusiast who
ever had his own private tarantula
colony and that was Dr. William Baerg
in Arkansas - whose story you can read
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is sloping (thus shedding rain water) and
at some point in the day catches the sun
(scrubland/grassland tarantula’s like to
warm up and can often be found
sunbathing) – but it also acts as a bug
platform – in that any flying or jumping
insects in the fields below the
embankment are likely to alight on it.
For those of you who will one day visit
Costa Rica to photograph tarantula
spiders – and remember it is illegal and
unnecessary to collect – seemanni is
very common – along this half of the
countries Pacific coastline – so common
that we may presume it to be the
dominant species in the region. You will
find other theraphosids in the area – but
you will have no problem finding
Aphonopelma seemanni.
My only regret is that in Costa Rica
2006 – I was still using a 35mm film
stock SLR. I brought back 33 rolls of
film and, of course, I had no idea what I
had successfully photographed and what
needed to be reshot - until I returned
home and then it was too late. Images I
have used out of necessity in this
Journal blog, on more recent fieldtrips I
would have probably deleted. In
Suriname 2012 I shot 4000 images –
sometimes 100 photographs of the same
spider – which gives one an awful lot of
piccies to choose from. Don’t let anyone
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tell you that the old 35mm film cameras
were better – a good digital camera like
a Cannon DSLR 30D is priceless –
unless, of course, it’s a 60D.
Let’s get back to Berthold Seemann –
who arrived back in England in June
1851 and immediately reported to Kew
Gardens with his fragile collection of
botanical acquisitions. All the zoological
material appears to have been
dispatched to the Natural History
department of the British Museum in
Bloomsbury. This was not the Natural
History Museum in South Kensington,
which did not open its doors until April
1881. And here the specimen stayed, in
a jar of alcohol, untouched for the next
46 years. There was a man who could
have described it earlier, Gilbert White
(who
wrote
a
description
of
Brachypelma emilia in 1856 - a spider,
which had been collected on the same
expedition by either Seemann or
Edmonston) but unfortunately Gilbert
White had a complete mental
breakdown and had to be confined to a
lunatic asylum.
But the wait was worthwhile, as the
spider ended up being described in 1897
in one of the greatest natural history
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worthier) - although I am credited with
making up the common name Zebra
Spider (first used in my 1986
publication, The Tarantula ID Guide) the
real author of the name was in fact the
Halesowen entomological trader Ian
Wallace, who was the first person to
import these spider into Europe from
Costa Rica and on whose lists I first saw
the name. The figure behind is Vincent
Hull-Williams.
publishing projects of all time, The
Biologia Centrali Americana - where
there was not just a written description
but also sumptuous illustration, (Arachn.
volume 2 on plate 3). The author was
Frederick Octavius Pickard-Cambridge,
a fascinating character, who described
the specimen as Eurypelma seemanni –
a name, which was changed by Reginald
Pocock in 1901 to Aphonopelma
seemanni – when he designated
seemanni as the genotype of the new
genus Aphonopelma.
If anybody knows of Ian Wallace’s
whereabouts please CONTACT ME at
[email protected] - as I
am very keen to re-establish contact
again.
For those of you who prefer to use
common names (try not to - the
scientific names are so much more
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