Saw this freaky thing today on my door jamb. Sorry for no scale but it was fairly large, like maybe 3-4 inches long at least. The location is in Riverside, CA. What could it be?
I am not a spiderologist nor a spideronemer, but I have successfully ID’d that as Absolutely Horrifying and Nightmarish.
That’s probably it! Thanks. Sounds like the females are especially nasty, and they’re squirters…
They are only nasty if you are a small insect and they want dinner. No hassle for humans.
Lynx spiders have the extremely long spiky hairs. That’s the way they detect a great deal about the world. Those hairs are incredibly sensitive.
Yours looks like a male to me. The pedipalps (aka palps), the small appendages on the front, are engorged at the end - although I can’t see clearly enough to be sure.
The males wander in search of a female and usually stop feeding. They have only one goal - to find a female and mate. To prepare for this great event (should they be lucky enough to come across a female in their last weeks) they spin a sperm web, ejaculate sperm onto it, gather the sperm in the organs on the end of the palps and head off. That way they don’t have to worry about actually producing the sperm when they deal with a mate who - if they get their signals wrong - might mistake them for dinner.
Incredible critters. Yours is particularly impressive!
They need to shave their legs too!
The Wikipedia entry says that the female, larger than the male, is under one inch in size, where the OP says that this one was 3-4". That’s quite a disparity, and if the OP’s is a male, then even more so.
So, OP, what did you do with it?
I can only imagine that that horrorshow has subdued the OP and is laying eggs in his (her?) brain.
It depends how you measure spider size. Wiki will use the usual arachologist measure which is body length. The general public often use the length of the spider including legs. Hence a massive difference.
The Wikipedia article says that the body is under an inch, and I assume the OP was talking about the overall length including legs.
Yeah - I read that too and realized they were just talking about the torso length. As a mere layperson, I was looking at the entire thing and including the legs in the estimate. Either way, it’s a big-ass spider.
Oh, and I left it alone since it was outside my residence (the door jamb in question was my apartment’s front door). If it was inside, I would have killed it in a heartbeat.
Wow. Never seen that before! Thank you for expanding my knowledge.
I think it is pretty.
Calling Colibri…
I was gazing at in awed fascination when I accidentally clicked my left mouse button and the damned thing grew 20 times larger. I’m still recovering from the shock!
So do I. That’s a beautiful green.
Sounds like your spider has been ID’d so I’m just going to throw out today’s funny spider experience. I was going through the utility room to the garage when I noticed a big, black, dead cricket lying on the floor. I bent over to pick it up for disposal and as I picked it up a tiny little spider jumped off of it, ran a few steps, turned towards me and raised it’s four front legs and shook it’s tiny fists in impotent rage. I felt bad so I put the cricket back where it was.
I just went out and looked, the cricket is still there, no sign of the spider.
I giggle uncontrollably every time I see that simpsons treehouse of horror parody of the fly and flybart (bartfly?) pretends to be stuck in the spiderweb only to buzz off with the spider shaking his four fists, as you describe.