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Comments & ID Thoughts
Been trying to figure out what kind of spider this is. At first I thought it was some sort of widow because of the shape of its entire body and legs but I knew it wasn't a black widow cuz we don't have the black widows here in North Dakota that I know of but I do know that there's different types of species of the widows, been searching for hours and keep getting different results every picture, so does anyone know exactly what this is, there's no pictures that I have found that looks exactly like this one, this picture isn't also the greatest but it was very difficult to get a good pic since it was barely out of hiding, n under a table so couldnt really get under the table very well. It had a marking on the front of the abdomen n one in the middle. If I can I'll get better pictures to show.
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Sep 29, 2024
- Photographed: Sep 29, 2024
- Spider: Unidentified
- Location: Rugby, ND, North Dakota, United States
- Spotted Outdoors: Man-made structure (building wall, fences, etc.)
- Found in web?: Yes
- Attributes:
My guess is that it is a female cobweb spider in the genus Steatoda..they tend to be extremely shiny….have a look at these pictures and see if any match…the females are the rounder fatter ones…bear in mind though that not all of them are found in North Dakota
https://spiderid.com/spider/theridiidae/steatoda/
Based on the picture I think it could be Steatoda borealis as I think it has a white line down its back?….it can ve hard to tell markings from shine with this species though
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30562582
The boreal comfort Steatoda borealis looked more like the one i saw, but the steatoda theridiidae looked like ot without markings. The one I saw had a line that went down half way about to the end of the marking in the middle, the middle marking looked like a line going down the middle but it was faded so it was almost a dot with a faint line to the next dot all the down, then the belly was yellow with weird markings that i couldn’t explain, now words describe it
These are some pictures of the underside of a few S borealis spiders. Their pattern is quite variable I am afraid
https://bugguide.net/node/view/774048/bgimage
https://bugguide.net/node/view/2105754/bgimage
https://spiderid.com/picture/103830/
When I looked up Steatoda borealis it said it’s a cobweb spider, so what’s the difference between all of them
It now saying boreal combfoot, cobweb spider r in the same family
These are just the different names for the same thing……Spiders in the genus Steatoda belong to a huge family whose Latin name is the Theridiidae….
.some people call this big family cobweb spiders …because their messy webs are called cobwebs……other people call them combfoot spiders because they have stiff short bristles on their lower legs…..because they family is so large and the spiders in it are so variable…it isn’t possible to fully identify some individuals…so the best we can do is to identify to genus level….like saying a spider belongs to the genus Steatoda in the family Theridiidae…