Welcome to the Montana Spiders Project
In the America of the 1800's and early 1900's there was great effort and emphasis placed upon surveying the flora and fauna of a relatively unknown "new" land. Such surveys, intially very broad in scope, were typified by the Lewis and Clark expedition which collected specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles, plants, rocks and minerals, and cultural materials of native peoples they encountered along the way. Later, surveys were a bit more specific ... intentionally focusing on one group or another and in relatively defined geographical areas. One outgrowth of this were the state surveys... sometimes Geological (as intially in NY) and sometimes Biological (as in Illinois).
Insects and spiders, in fact all invertebrates, were a bit longer to enter the scene and it was really Nathan Banks while at Cornell University in the 1890's who undertook the first spider species survey in a specific area. His "Spider Species of the Upper Cayuga Lake Basin" was the first of many forays into spider collection and taxonomy for Banks who continued to collect for many years. Nearly all of his specimens now reside as part of the Cornell University Spider collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Having spent years collecting in the Northeast US with occasional forays elsewhere, I am pleased to be located in Southeastern Montana where very little collecting has been done. I have some preconceptions of what I should find here but those preconceptions are not really useful until (and if!) realized. In the meanwhile I have been collecting a good deal of material and look forward to a good deal more.
I would like to place your records here also. If you have a species collected at a particular location, please feel free to pass it along and I will post it here. Please be as complete as possible where the specimen's data are concerned.
Please bear with me as I begin to formulate this page and make information available. In the meanwhile, if you have questions, comments, or records to share, please e-mail me at montanaspiders@yahoo.com or at carlton47@earthlink.net and I will respond as quickly and appropriately as I can. (The earthlink address is probably best.) July 2003
It is intended to be a place where information about spiders can be exchanged ... with one caveat. It is not a "Pets" page. It does not address the keeping of spiders or scorpions as pets. There are lots of "Tarantula" pages out there which deal specifically with the pet world. For that kind of information you will do better to look to those pages ... not these.
Thanks for visiting...
Scott Carlton
Available Now:
Montana Spider Work -- Current
Links to other Arachnology Sites on the Web