Yum, deep fried white tailed spider.
But seriously, I didn’t know that distinction. YLSNED
He sure is. I thought the same thing.
And the scariest thing about Charlotte’s Web was not the spider. It’s Dakota Fanning in the new one. 
Truth, earlier when I posted “Yes, I saw the previews, shuddered and said “no hwaaaaay!”.” many dudes here thought I was thinking of the spider. No I was thinking of Dakota.
Here’s a link that has a bunch of spiders in your area. There are some that were close.
The ones here, Pacific NW, are very small (ladybug sized) and not that scary as a result. They are among the cuter spiders we have, skittering about like little angry puff balls.
I much prefer them over the mega-house spiders we get with horrendous long legs that run like lightning. I caught one with my vacuum cleaner hose the other day and freaked out as I heard and felt it “thump thump thump” its way up the tube. A week later and I’m still afraid to empty the bucket, I’ll have to pay the neighbor kid to do it I think.
Have you written any unfavorable news articles about Vladimir Putin?
<obvious but long overdue joke>
The backstroke?
</obloj>
How long did it take to work up the courage to actually post that?
Okay, this wins the thread. [wipes tears from eyes, spit from keyboard]
If you were more familiar with my board history you’d know I require no courage at all to post a stupid joke. 
*Not[/i[ a lurker, eh?
That there spider doesn’t look like the white-tailed spiders that I’ve seen around here. Their abdomen isn’t as rounded and is longer in relation to their overall size. Also, the legs don’t look brown; more black and white striped like their bodies. (Although I see in your link that maybe it’s the juveniles that have black and white striped legs.) Also check Wikipedia
Another clue would be its behaviour. White-tails are quite aggressive. if you challenge them with your finger, they’ll tend to attack.
Cheers,
Paul
I agree with Paul. We have lots of white-taileds here and I am a spider obsessive, writing a book about these 8-legged adorables, so spend a few hours every day looking at them. The cold won’t worry them - some species live in Tasmania. Size isn’t much guide. White-taileds are genus Lampona (Family Lamponidae), of which there are nearly 60 species currently classified and they vary from very small to quite large. The bodies tend to be cylindrical and the white dot is very obvious. The world’s biggest guru on spiders, Norman Platnick from the museum of natural history in New York, came over and reclassified them all in 2000. Classification of Australian spiders is still a mess. Lots of dead spiders in jars in the vaults of museums waiting to be named!
Don’t feel guilty about the leg - you didn’t do it, the spider did. Autotomy: the ability to amputate one of their own legs. They autotomize them. They drop a leg if it is caught. If it is a young spider, it will regenerate in the next molt. If it is an adult, it will go on with 7 legs. If you start looking at spiders closely, you’ll see a sigificant proportion have only 7 legs.
I would say yours is a ground spider of some kind (Family Gnaphosidae), but they are notoriously hard to classify without a degree in arachnology and a good microscope staring at their genitals. There are nearly two thousand species.
White-tailed are venemous - but then so are 107 of the 108 families. They bite a lot because they are so common in houses and crawl into clothes and shoes. Most people never know they have been bitten. The blistering is a rare reaction. They are harmless, unless you are a blackhouse spider. Then you are their favourite meal.
The pairs of white spots on many spiders are often part of the gut showing through the abdomen wall when the spider is well fed. I just got told that by an arachnologist and I thought it was cool!
Lynne
Here you go, I believe. I thought it looked related to the Parson’s spiders I have all over the place here, but I had to check what might be in your area.
You know, some of us were still managing to convince themselves that arachnologists weren’t really all that weird, until you posted that.
No, but I’ve criticized John Howard on the Internet a few times!
Thanks for the valuable input, all! Kiwi Fruit and lynne-42 especially, you guys have pretty much laid my doubts to rest.
As for its behavior, it definitely was not aggressive at all. It spent most of its time running and hiding; it built itself some tangled webs in the jar, and it took quite a bit of poking and prodding to get it out so I could photograph it.
Fetchund, that’s perfect! Mine was slightly less hair and just a little rounder (maybe a female?) but that looks like it’s almost definitely it. I think I can finally sleep easy now that I know there aren’t any Australian secret police agents trying to kill me.
(Though I guess it would take a few thousand white-tailed bites to do a fellow in… maybe they use a whole bucketful.)
Now that the OP has been answered, I have a closely related question:
Aren’t all spiders venomous?
Cool spider there, Stealth Potato. And cool the way you treated it. He gave you a keepsake in appreciation. Gonna keep it?
1,629 views and only 36 replies?
Buncha pussies. 
All except the family Uloboridae, a worldwide family of hackled orb weavers, who build woolly not sticky webs. So 263 species of Uloboridae out of nearly 40,000 species of spiders aren’t venomous. (Spider numbers vary daily as the arachnologists keep trying to get the taxonomy right.)
Woolly not sticky webs? What use are woolly not sticky webs for catching bugs?
(Kids these days with their crazy newfangled technology…)