Comments & ID Thoughts
I would like to know what kind of spider this is. My guess is maybe a grass spider just based off of an initial internet search. It's about 1 1/2 inches (~4 cm) long including the legs extended. The body is about 1/3 of total length. This was on a rainy day in the southeastern USA in the mid afternoon.
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Feb 19, 2020
- Photographed: Feb 19, 2020
- Spider: Unidentified
- Location: South Carolina, United States
- Spotted Outdoors: Man-made structure (building wall, fences, etc.)
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes:
This is a Nursery Web Spider, Pisaurina mira. Thank you for looking for the ID on your own. These spiders live in the same areas that Grass Spiders do – leaf litter, low plants, and sides of buildings. They both ambush prey rather than having sticky webs. Nursery Web Spiders are in the same family as Fishing Spiders. Both make a web around their hatching egg sacs that kind of resembles a bounce house (but much safer). It keeps the hatchlings from wandering off before they are ready and gives their mother the ability to guard them all from predators.
Thank you so much! I wasn’t at all confident in the grass spider guess, but I couldn’t find too much else online that looked similar enough.