Hi! First time posting....
We found a large brown spider making a HUGE web on our porch. I grabbed my camera and was able to take a picture of it's underside. There is a distinct marking on it's abdomen that is like a white square with a black "hourglass-looking" shape. Can anyone tell me what it is? I've seen them before and I'm hoping they're the harmless-but-scary-looking type. Thanks for any replies!
Here's another picture of the spider...
Oh yeah we have at least five of those going. They are not harmful- just very creepy.
Am I the only one seeing that this spider is making his way into other people's posts??! There have been a couple posts on this forum (AFTER my post) about this same kind of spider! Ok, so it's an orb-weaver and is "harmless".... but what is it??!! What's it's name?? It IS a scary looking thing, and having a name to put to it (so we can google it and learn about it) would be super cool. So, anyone have an answer?
xo
Someone adressed that question on another of these 'brown orb spider ' threads.
You may have equal luck googling common brown orb spider, or something like that, and find a naturalist or nature center website has profiled them.
A definitive identification to species level is not possible using your photographs, but we can probably narrow it down to two genera: Neoscona and Araneus. Neoscona spp. are known as the spotted orbweavers. Araneus is also a genus in the orb-weaver family (Araneidae) and it can require close examination to distinguish between certain species. That being said, here's one that is worth looking at:
Barn Spider (Neoscona crucifera)
http://bugguide.net/node/view/28154/bgimage
Have fun learning about these spiders!
flatpickit, I think you got it!!! That looks exactly like the spider we saw, and what I found out about it fits as well. Thank you!!!!
Btw, I read a wiki article about the Barn Spider and found this interesting tidbit:
"This spider was made well-known in the book Charlotte's Web by American writer E. B. White, with a particularly interesting point that the spider's full name is Charlotte A. Cavatica, a reference to the barn spider's scientific name, Araneus cavaticus. Also one of Charlotte's daughters, after asking what her mother's middle initial was, names herself Aranea; which ties in with the Order in which this spider is classified."
Now I don't hate it so much ;)
