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Comments & ID Thoughts
Upon closer examination, the spider seemed to have very short sporadic hairs. It was surprisingly quick and nimble for its size. It was running on the ceiling without falling at about the pace of a walking human. It seemed to panic with the commotion below when it lost its footing and dropped and hid on that cutting board in the pic. At full outstretched leg-span, it seemed to be about as big as 3/4 an open palm of an adult human. We spotted another one of these about 2 years later at around the same month, so they seem to be active in hot and humid Mediterranean summers. In both instances, the spider was found on the ceiling of our kitchen.
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Sep 2, 2020
- Photographed: Jul 16, 2018
- Spider: Unidentified
- Location: Kiryat Tivon, Israel
- Spotted Indoors: Other
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes:
This looks like Tegenaria parietina to me.
Hmm, I’m looking your suggestion up on Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia. The patterns seem similar but i think the spider i saw had a smaller/flatter abdomen and slightly more… “solid”/”strong”-looking legs? It’s possible that i just found bad online photos and videos to compare or that i found a bulkier specimen but they seem slightly different
Another possibility could be a Sparassidae of some kind..a spider in this family would be more consistent with your description. I’m thinking of Eusparassus sp., maybe E. walckenaeri.
Wow! Looking up those terms got some really close-looking matches! Eusparassus dufouri and Eusparassus walckenaeri seemed extremely similar.
https://www.naturspaziergang.de/Spinnen/Eusparassus_walckenaeri.htm
There are so many of these Huntsman types though, so it could be any number of them but this may very well be the right family!
Thank you for the link, which confirms that E. walckenaeri is established in the “Near East”.
The list of Eusparassus sp. is discouragingly long, but you can narrow it down, if you take the range into account. Take E. dufouri for example: I’ve just checked its range and it turned out that it’s established in Spain and Portugal only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusparassus
Due to its range, E. walckenaeri would seem to be best candidate, if the genus is correct 🙂
I agree, it matches in size, region, hour and location of finding (“The species does not build fishing nets, but roams around to acquire prey, especially at dusk and at night.”), season of finding, features… This might very well be a closed-case here unless someone comes up and disputes it.
Thank you very much for the quick and accurate identification so far!
You’re welcome! It’s a wonderful spider, anyway. I’m from Italy, so I should get a chance to sight it, too. I guess I’d have to move southward, though 😀
With global warming and all that, maybe you won’t have to and it will increase its habitat northwards 😀
In any case, yes, it was quite a magnificent and majestic specimen to be found IN-HOME considering its great size. Albeit a very frightening discovery >_<