I am writing a book about spiders and am keen to know what spiders are most commonly encountered around the house by Dopers.
I am a recovered arachnophobe who overdid the cure and am now obsessed by spiders. My goal is to now convert the entire world to arachnophilia!
Lynne
Go play with your funnel webs. I will pass.
I am in Michigan and a fuzzy little spider about a quarter inch long walked up my arm. I meant no harm and just watched it. When it got to my elbow it gave me an extremely painful bite. it was not me. Spiderland declared war. Now I let my cat deal with them.
Of course in Austrailia you have 18 of the top 20 poisonous snakes. You have spiders that can put your lights out. You have crockadiles that see people as a food group. Even the platypus has a poisonous spine. Take a swim you get great white sharks . Walk the beach and you got cute little octopi that can kill you.
Of course the ozone hole keeps you inside,so it does not matter.
Mostly the LBS - Little Brown Spider. I’m sure that includes many different spiders. I leave them alone. We get tarantulas roaming around at certain times of the year, I’m guessing that is the breeding season.
Black widows are common here too, and I kill those on sight. I’ll go out of my way to kill them. I used to have a live and let live attitude towards them until a friend suffered a bite. From his description of it, I decided to do my best to get them out of my house, though I mostly see them outside and in my garage.
While not spiders, centipedes and scorpions are also on my kill list because both have show up in my bed at night. The centipede was an exciting time.
Wolf spiders are common in my house. In warm weather I pick them up and put them outside. If I find one in the Winter, I put it in the basement.
I mainly see daddy long legs spiders. They’re pale, spindly, slow and not very alarming. I believe their main diet is other spiders, so they must just all be eating each other. We do have one in our bathroom window frame that looks for all the world like a black widow, but it doesn’t seem to have the red marking.
Mostly we see daddy long legs, which I know aren’t really spiders, right? And those little teeny TEENY tiny green guys. Also we have the large orb weaver garden spiders outside sometimes; last year I had two very large ones spinning webs, and I caught one making an egg sac!
Miscellaneous Spider Photography by Kozmic Dreams HERE ARE OUR BEAUTIES.
I mostly see variations of the genus Squishem HardnFastisus …
We occasionally get hunting spiders in the house. They don’t last long (we have three cats).
What, nobody else keeps acromantulas?
There are plenty of (smaller) spiders at my mom’s house, the most common being of a type she calls “wolf spider”. They don’t look too much like the ones I’m finding online, though: They’re brown-and-black striped, and have a legspread about the size of a quarter, or a bit larger, but they have a more robust build than most of the ones I’m finding pictures of, and strongly tapered legs. They weave webs in the familiar spokes-and-concentric-polygons pattern.
And there are two different critters called “daddy long legs”. One, native to the northern US, is not a true spider (though it is an arachnid), has very long, spindly legs, uses its second pair of legs as feelers, and tastes a bit like peppermint (or so I’ve been told). They’re completely nonvenomous, and don’t spin webs. The other is the Daddy Long Legs Spider, native to the southern US, and is a true spider, and like all true spiders, does spin webs and has venom, but it’s not a very potent venom (contrary to popular belief), and is even less agressive towards humans than usual for critters that size.
hey you come from my locale! hello friend!
Thank you to everyone who has replied so far. This is really helpful.
I am particularly keen to know how many of you have what Americans and Europeans call funnel-webs (totally different to what we call funnel-webs which are ground burrowing spiders).
Thank you cher3 - I am interested in your daddy long-legs. This is a confusing topic.I’d love a further comment if you feel like looking closely at it and seeing how many body segments it has. From your description, it sounds like the spider.
These comments are really interesting, too. Garden orb weavers seem to be worldwide which is really useful as they will feature strongly. Incredible sight to watch them weave the orb, isn’t it?
I have no idea what the little teeny TEENY tiny green guys are. Anyone able to help? Crab spiders?
The daddy long-legs issue is a purplexing one. The confusion is because there are two different creatures which have very long spindly legs and hang on messy webs. Some are spiders (family Pholcidae) and have two body segments. The ones with one round body segment are not spiders, but are arachnids, and called harvestmen.
The confusion is that in Australia we tend to call them both daddy long-legs. The ones inside the house are usually spiders, and the ones outside are usually harvestmen. The spiders were introduced here and are found world wide.
From what I read, Americans call the spdier version Cellar Spiders and the harvestmen Daddy long-legs. But that may be the offical understanding, not the one in the general public, which is why I find your comments so interesting. I got that understanding from here . Any comments would be appreciated.
Thanks again,
Lynne
WOW!!!
This is FANTASTIC! I have just spent an hour on your site and loved it. I am using blogs of my own spiders for the narrative thread of the book, (you can meet some here. I really didn’t think it would be possible with jumping spiders because my experience wasn’t seeing the same individuals again. So this really surprises (and delights) me. I have just got into macro photography and am totally hooked.
I am very interested in talking to you about possibly including Biglegs’ story in the book, and purchasing rights to an image. If that would be of interest, could you contact me? My contact details are in my profile. I am not sure what the board etiquette is and I don’t want to do the wrong thing!
Lynne
That was crap and I didn’t edit in time because I was too hooked on gonzomax’s site. (See how well I shifted the blame for being an idiot?) Harvestmen don’t build webs. Now to read on with your great replies.
Lynne
Glad to see someone got daddy long-legs right. Wish I had! Tastes like peppermint? Any chance of more on this? How would you get enough to even get a taste. Or aren’t they the tiny bodied things I am imagining? I do not want to try any experiments to verify this. I was told by one of the spider experts that the daddly-long-legs (spider) venom has never been tested because it is just not a very interesting venom.
What’s an acromantula? Looked cute. I collect all things spidery.
The wolf spider anecdote is intriguing. As wolf spiders don’t spin webs, and you are describing an orb web, and I don’t know how big a quarter is, I am totally at a loss. If they are common in urban areas, I’d really like to know more. Love the accuracy of the concentric polygons. I have always gone with the circles, but of course, you are right.
And Hi to kat&&herbrain! - I should have put everything into one post instead of lots and lots, but I get confused doing more than one thing at once. In fact, I often get confused doing one thing.
Lynne
In inner west of Sydney, in this order:
Orb spiders of various types
Huntsmen
Sydney Funnel Webs
Cheers,
G
Black Widows and miscellaneous innocuous little brown things. I assume they aren’t brown recluses, but life is to short to worry about it. I’m not particularly susceptible to insect bites any how. And then I get these humongous things in the yard with webs that can span about 3 feet. I walk through them almost every day. Their abdomens approach the size of a marble, with a total body size including legs about the size of a half dollar.
By far the most obvious spider I see at home is the St Andrew’s Cross. We have several spanning the spaces in our garden. After that, I see a lot of Red Backs and daddy long leg type things. I suspect the daddy long legs are the most numerous, but they don’t stand out the way a St Andrew’s Cross spider does.
I used to see Huntsman spiders when I was living in Darwin.
Bolding mine.
A quarter is somewhere in size between an Aussie 20c and 10c piece, closer to the 20c than the 10c.
Cheers,
G
I see a lot of spiders around here. The most common, by far, is the beautiful jorou-gumo, or nephila clavata. I took some good pictures a few years ago, but they’re not digitized. Here’s what I found on the web (the last picture is particularly good):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ja/4/4e/Jorougumo-1.jpg
http://homepage1.nifty.com/s-ozeki/gazo/bangai/shizen/shizen2.jpg
