Ischnocolus valentinus (Dufour, 1820)
Male © Hernández-Corral, Barrientos & García-Teba (2025), fig. 11A, male in dorsal viewType Locality and Records
Original Description
Distribution
Adult Male Activity
Collection months of 3 adult male specimen records, against the rainfall where they live
Mean monthly rainfall and temperature 2001–2020 near where these males were collected. MERRA-2 via NASA POWER, for a grid cell averaging 1 m. Northern hemisphere seasons. Records span 2 countries (Spain, Turkey), so one climate curve cannot describe all of them.
Synonyms
Specimen Records (6)
Non-type male of Ischnocolus valentinus, deposited in the Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum, Frankfurt (SMF), jar label '85 b – Nemesiidae, TR 74'. The first record of the species, and of the genus, from Turkey. The label gives the province as Aydın; Geci et al. (2026) correct this to Muğla on the coordinates. Total length including chelicerae 13.90 mm. Figured in dorsal and ventral habitus, tibia I, and the palpal bulb.
One adult male of Ischnocolus valentinus taken in a pitfall trap, and the FIRST RECORD of the family Theraphosidae from Alicante province. The traps ran continuously across six zones from May 2009 to November 2010, so the exact month is not resolvable; this specimen came from zone 6 on the sunny southern face. Held in the first author's collection.
Record of Ischnocolus valentinus from 2,047 m in the High Atlas; determined by S. Lecigne and J. Korba.
Genitalia
Taxonomic History
- Ischnocolus valentinus (Dufour, 1820) — type species of Ischnocolus Ausserer, 1871, and so of the subfamily Ischnocolinae.
- Described from Valencia as Mygale valentina, the name has absorbed nine junior synonyms across a century, most of them Simon's and Ausserer's North African material. The range as understood until now was the western Mediterranean: Spain, Sicily, and the Maghreb from Morocco to Libya.
- 2026 Geci et al. (2026) added Turkey, from a single male that had been sitting mislabelled in a jar of Nemesiidae at the Senckenberg since 1992. They think it introduced rather than native: more than a decade of fieldwork on Turkish mygalomorphs by two of the authors has turned up no other Ischnocolus anywhere in the country. The collecting locality was a shoreline harbour town, Herakleia, roughly 2,500 years ago, on a Mediterranean trade network that is already blamed for the scorpion Euscorpius italicus arriving in the same region.