The new species of tarantula was found in the foothills of the western Sierra Nevada mountains, near Folsom Prison. The males of the species are predominately black. It didn’t take too much of a leap to name the species after Johnny Cash, the “Man in Black.” It is called Aphonopelma johnnycashi.
Johnny Cash had great compassion for prisoners and began performing concerts in prisons in the late 1950s. After a successful concert at San Quentin prison in 1959, Cash recorded two highly popular live albums, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (1968) and Johnny Cash at San Quentin (1969).
The man behind the study, reports the BBC, is Chris Hamilton. As part of his Ph.D. research at Auburn University, he whittled down the Aphonopelma genus, one of the dozens of tarantula genera that had previously included over 50 species, down to 29. In the process of his investigation, he was able to eliminate some double-counting that had taken place, and he also defined 14 new species.
“We really tried to clean the taxonomy up,” said Dr. Hamilton, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “The only way we could do that was by looking at over 3,000 specimens, both from the wild and from natural history collections.”
With a three-person team from the Florida Museum of Natural history, National Geographic Magazine reported that thousands of hours were logged over a 10-year period, traveling all over the U.S. This also included time in the laboratory and field work in mountains and arid deserts.
“For such a popular organism in our culture, whether it’s Hollywood movies or B-movies, there’s not really much work that’s been done on tarantulas,” Hamilton said. “Past arachnologists would get really frustrated and give up.”
The 340-page survey rewrites scientists’ understanding of Aphonopelma, a greatly understudied genus of harmless North American tarantula, according to the study in Zookeys. The team amassed a huge collection of Aphonopelma, containing over 3,000 specimens, many from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
An exhaustive study ensued, with measurements of each specimen, DNA sequencing, and cross-checking of old, outdated records. One specimen, Aphonopelma hentzi, for instance, had been mislabeled nine times over the years, all using a different species name.
The study, “Revision of the-Taxonomic Tarantula the genus Aphonopelma Pocock, 1901 ( of Araneae , Mygalomorphae , the Theraphosidae ) Within the-United’s States,” was published in the journal Zookeys on February 4, 2016.
