Unidentified

Picture ID 119759

Picture of unidentified spider

Comments & ID Thoughts

I have no clue what this spider is however my initial impression originally being from Utah and seeing black widows everywhere was that the body shape and style of webbing was nearly identical to the black widow, except brown. So I thought "oh maybe it is a brown widow?" However looking at the range of both black and brown widows I saw they do not come all the way up here to Massachusetts. It also doesn't have a red spot. It looks similar to many of the orb weavers on this and website, how the web is different and it doesn't match very close to many of these others

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TangledWeb

Your deductive reasoning is very good. This spider is in genus Parasteatoda. It is in the same family, Theridiidae, as the Widows and it makes tanglewebs/ cobwebs like they do. The shape of the body in this genus does look like a female orbweaver. I don’t live far from you (Nashua, NH) and I have lots of these spiders on the exterior of my house. No, we don’t have Brown Widows, but theoretically there are Black Widows. I can’t find anyone who has seen one in New England except imported in Walmart clothes or Shaw’s produce. One fewer thing to… Read more »