#21B - FULL DISCLOSURE - MY ONLY "HYBRIDIZATION"

In fairness and honesty I must disclose my very recent "potential" hybridization - the one and only of my career ...

When Jason Newland went to Peru last spring he began to sell many of his spiders. This was the trip prior to the one he just returned from that lasted almost 7 months. I bought a number of spiders and he gave me one unusual spider. It was sold to him as P. cambridgei, but after he raised her to adulthood he realized that it looked like it was part cambridgei and part P. irminia. To his credit, he never bred her for that reason and gave it to me at no charge as he just wanted it to have a good home.

What this spider proves is what I mentioned in the main blog (#21) about unintentional hybridization. Jason acquired this cambridgei when it was young from my dear friends Bruce Effenheim and Bill Korinek of the now defunct Theraphosid Breeding Project. They were a credit to the hobby and I can assure you that they never knowingly would create hybrids. Assuming that Jason's spider - now mine - is indeed 50/50 cambridgei/irminia you have to wonder how that happened. One likely scenario is that they had a female cambridgei and the male they paired her with was from someone else who didn't realize it was in fact irminia or even knowingly misrepresented it. Another likely scenario is that they used their own male, but a labeling error or the lack of a label altogether had them mistakenly thinking that the male was cambridgei. Of course, these are just conjectures. I have no idea what really happened and, in truth, cannot positively say that the spider is a cambridgei/irminia hybrid. But if you look at this photo I think you will suspect it is, just like Jason and I. (The reason I am using Jason's photo instead of taking my own is that within the past two nights the female molted. If I photographed her now she would look even more like a hybrid as she is very dark like P. irminia. And I've just never bothered to photograph her before).

So let us presume the female in the photograph is P. cambridgei x P. irminia. The only other option is that it is a highly varied aberrant P. cambridgei, but as I am sure most of you know there really isn't that much color or pattern variance in a "clutch" of tarantulas. Jason never bred her and I had no intention of doing so either. I don't really keep "pet" spiders. All of my tarantulas are part of breeding projects or are for sale. But I couldn't sell this one and I didn't want to breed her. So a "pet" she became. What's another spider to care for when your collection numbers in the four digits??!?

So, how did I come to end up breeding her despite my best intentions? It certainly wasn't an accident. A loose male didn't sneak into her cage in the night. I had bought a large group of juvenile P. cambridgei for resale. This inexpensive spider isn't that popular (although it is a gorgeous and large display arboreal). They are just common and easy to breed and very cheap. They're a tough sell. So these juveniles grew quickly and I began to sex them so I could sell guaranteed females at a premium price. In the end, this left me with 21 mature males. Imagine that! 21 mature males and ZERO mature females. As much as I love the species, I have no interest in breeding spiders that have so little value and don't have females. The same amount of space could be devoted to an income-producing species. That's just the cold, hard truth. I earn my living breeding spiders. Left with all these mature males, which would mostly die of old age in my collection I decided to feed some to her. I gave her six in all. I knew that there was a good possibility that at least one would successfully mate with her. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't. Then I could say that I have never hybridized (knowingly) in almost three decades of tarantula breeding. However, once she produced a sac I made the easy decision that I would either freeze the sac so no young were produced or let it run its course and keep all the babies and raise them to see if they appeared 75% cambridgei and 25% irminia, which is the worst they would be if the mother was 50/50 since I knew the males were 100% cambridgei. I still am not positive that the female is a hybrid. But the photo makes me confident she is. The sac only produced about 25 live young and many dead embryos. I've had cambridgei produce 100-150 or more so this is further evidence that hybridization might have occurred. Reproduction was not at its full potential. So, I've been raising the young to see what they'll look like in adulthood. None will be sold. I had a spider friends party last weekend and I gave some of them away to people that I trust would NEVER SELL and, more importantly, NEVER BREED. They promised to keep as pets. I have only about a dozen left myself and they will be pets - NEVER SOLD, NEVER BRED. Sexed males will be euthanized. It's a cruel world. Sexed females will be raised to see if they "look like" hybrids or not, just out of my own curiosity. Then they will live out their lives as pets.