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- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Feb 29, 2024
- Photographed: Feb 29, 2024
- Spider: Insects
- Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
- Spotted Indoors: Basement or Cellar
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes:
Insects
Picture ID 193872
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Aug 12, 2024
Aug 12, 2024
Peridot, 
Help identify this spider
Sorry he is squashed That’s how I found him or her. Basement floor. Philadelphia PA
This is a cave cricket/spider cricket! Not an actual spider
🙂
I have to dis agree, this clearly has 8 legs and no visible antennae.
This only has 6 legs, not sure where you are seeing the other 2. The antennae have been broken off but are visible. The joints of the legs, length, and pattern in addition to the pronged feet absolutely point towards something on the ceithophilus species. The thorax shape and even the meaty thighs. You can tell the structure of the thighs is not that of a spider. There are a ton of subspecies of this cricket. Check them out and look at the patterns and legs.
Stygius is a close match
Not much to work with here. Far from any confirmation, the colors and patterns could be a brown widdow.
Sadly, squish first, ID later doesn’t work well.
This does not resemble a brown widow at all if you look at reference photos. This is not a spider
The number of these that I have encountered personally, held, spooked friends with, and felt creepy around is unimaginable. Try walking through a middle tunnel with a flashlight and the walls to ceiling are COVERED in these!
I’ll stick with finding lots of photos of cave crickets/spider crickets/Stygius.
https://bugguide.net/node/view/2294368 This is a link to one of my photos on Bugguide of a live Camel Cricket, which is what I think this is. You may be able to use the specific identification of mine to backtrack through the taxonomy. The spurs on the legs of mine are different than this one. It’s interesting to see what the last pair of legs looks like fully extended compared to against the body. Similar to a frog’s. I find camel cricket at night near stone walls.
Please ignore the “Additional Pictures” that our website attaches, they don’t have anything to do with this. 🙁
Wonderful information. Who knew I could know so much now about a bug I never heard of before? I believe I saw a live one a couple of years ago. When I went into my bedroom and turned on the light he ran fast across the room and under the bed. He was enormous, too much for me to deal with so I just concentrated on memorizing something that might help identification, particularly what looked like orange stripes on his body, going from one side to the other. For the first time I see that same feature in the photo… Read more »