Sorry about the quality of the photos. I only have a little CoolPix L1 and I can’t get too close and still focus.
So here I am, hanging out on the couch, watching some Olympic pole vaulting, when I detect movement on the floor about a foot and a half below my face. I sit up and see that it’s a spider. I grab for the flashlight, and it’s gone. But I find it again. Now how to catch it? I find a jar, but this is a fast-moving spider. I lose it again. Ah, but it has stopped right between my feet. I put the jar over it and slide a piece of paper underneath. I have a ‘penalty jar’ in the bathroom. (Spiders aren’t allowed in the house if I can see them, so they have to spend time in the penalty jar until I let them go outside.) It has a little spider I caught recently in it. Anyway, I make the transfer from the non-secure jar to the penalty jar, and thence to a plastic bucket I had sitting on a shelf waiting for a use.
I put a disposable lighter in the pail for size comparison. You can just see the little spider too.
First guess, Tegenaria agrestis.
I looked up the hobo spider, and the Wiki pictures do look similar. But the article said they only grow to about 15mm. This one is much larger, as you can see in the photos. But they may have been talking about the body of the hobo spider, and not the span. Wiki doesn’t have anything for scale.
It might be Tegenaria duellica, the giant house spider. It looks right, and the size is right. Plus it’s indigenous to the PNW.
Ahhh, I remember life in Seattle. Luckily for me, my ex had some weird thing about eating spiders, so we rarely had them in the house for long. (Don’t ask, seriously!) Where we live now makes the PNW look like spider-no-man-land, though. This lovely lady kept us all enthralled with her wonderful webs outside last year. If you’d like, I can bring more pictures (they’re on another computer, not loaded to the web) of other, rather large spiders my daughter has captured.
Spiders are so cool. I want to see your pics, Litoris.
The spider was last seen in the back yard, making a remarkably hasty track away from the house.
