maturation?

[gary spencer]

hello everyone how can i tell when females are sexually mature?
for example i have a lasadoria parahybana and she was about six inches and then she shed and now is about 6.5" to 7" at what size do they mature? many thanks Gary

[Eduard Johan Hijmensen]

i don't think you can tell exactly when the female is adult (ready to re-produce.) One way is to look at the spermathecae in a molt. if the spermathecae is not transparant anymore the female is usually mature..... this means you can only see if the female was mature... not if she will be mature.

Eddy

[lynn mawdesley]

You could always search for breeding report threads on L parahybana and ask the author what size the females were, i know Mary Walters on here has bred them could be worth sending her a PM
I know alot of people tend to compare the carapace size against a MM's and if the same size or larger then its usually a good sign that she will be ready ...although this may prove difficult if theres not one nearby lol
Sorry i cant help further but its not a species ive kept as adult

[Alistair Kennington]

looked twice

HA HA half asleep here ,your title made me look twice when scanning down the list of posts...

[Colin D Wilson]

As Eddy says there is evidence to state that the overall "lack of" translucency of the spermatecae is an idication of maturity.
It seems, however, that a lot of people are not willing to wait untill the female spider is of a decent "adult" size (i.e. L paharybana would be 8 inches plus) before they consider breeding. This "could" be why there are so many variable sizes per species in the resulting mature males, we have two L paharybana MM here... one being mature at just over 6 inches and the other being 7.5 inches plus.. both these were from different egg sacs.

Over the years i have noticed vast size differences between G rosea / G porteri mature males, some being WC and some being CB, either WC or CB have been of different sizes which leads me to presume (if breeding size is a consideration) that "pre full adult size" breeding quite often occurs in their natural habitat.
Another obvious example to me of this is the G pulchripes (ex G aureostriata) which, when i first saw an adult female many, many years ago, was an impressive 7/8 inches LS, now adult females are for sale at 5-6 inches (this seems to be terminal size as the majority of them do not show size increase after a moult).

In short i think we need to have patience to leave our spiders to grow up untill we can be sure that they've attained full size.

[James Box]

Alistair, glad it wasn't just me lol

Colin very interesting point...might explain why certain species seem small.
i had some tiny C darlingi not long ago (boarding at Mr Flower's in Wales now), that for all appearances were mature, the male was tiny, the females vaguely responsive (to varying degrees), but maybe half the size of others i've seen.