Login
Register
Comments & ID Thoughts
Night walk observations.
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Jul 18, 2020
- Photographed: Jul 17, 2020
- Spider: Unidentified
- Location: Sandston, Virginia, United States
- Spotted Outdoors: Man-made structure (building wall, fences, etc.)
- Found in web?: Yes
- Attributes:
Wow, what a perspective! Now I understand why spiders do this for a threat display. It’s imposing. Is this spider the same as in these two images?
https://spiderid.com/picture/116551/
https://spiderid.com/picture/116545/
I’m guessing it is Tigrosa annexa, based on the markings visible in the other views.
What a keen eye you have! These three pics are all indeed of the same spider. There is an unused glass door where there was what I referred to as the colony of these guys. There were about five or six of hem with their fancy tunnels situated one above the other.
Oh, right, they were in webs! Whoops. Not wolf spiders, then. I should have paid more attention to the eye arrangement. Recalculating…..
The eye arrangement and web structures seem consistent with Family Agelenidae, the Funnel Weavers. The closest thing I’ve found so far is Agelenopsis naevia, a type of grass spider, but it doesn’t have banded legs.
https://bugguide.net/node/view/93486/bgimage
Recalculating….. That made me laugh out loud…. literally. Definitely some type of grass spider; I would have probably gone with this one and not noticed the banded legs difference… Gees these guys are so similar yet the smallest thing changes who they are….
😀 Always glad to cause a smile. You’re pretty funny, too.
This is exciting – here’s an Agelenopsis naevia individual that does have the leg bands. We may have the right species after all.
https://bugguide.net/node/view/674855/bgimage
Aha! Love it when we are veridied as not crazy!!
Verified as.not crazy.
😀 I have a funnel web spider living on my front porch. I read a bit about the structure and properties of the funnel when researching for this ID. The web itself isn’t sticky, so it traps insects strictly by entanglement of their feet. I’d been wondering how ants manage to scavenge wings from the web without getting trapped. There are silk ‘trip lines’ above the main sheet of web, designed to knock flying insects down into it. My spider replaces/repairs those every night, and expands a little bit. He lives behind the doorframe, with his web coming from the… Read more »
Oh I know well how these guys go about catching their prey. I have literally sat for over an hour at night just watching them creep out of the confines of the deepest part of their funnels and just sit with unbelievable patience and wait for whatever might hit that trip line you mentioned. And when it does there is no way out. No time for them to even think about escape. When the funnel spider feels that disturbance he shoots out like a bullet and grabs the unlucky soul retreating back to its funnel within seconds! I mean if… Read more »
Oh, wow! That must be really cool to watch. I don’t usually get to see them at all, but when I do, they’re either in the dark funnel or a blur. Haha – the racing stripes. Yep, the quiet ones are the ones with something up their sleeves. And with spiders having eight sleeves, that’s a lot.