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Comments & ID Thoughts
Same specimen as photo 42565, slightly different angle. My guess is Trachelas tranquillus, the broad-faced sac spider. I previously said it was on my house, I got my spiders confused, it was in tall grass and weeds adjacent to my yard.
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Oct 22, 2018
- Photographed: Sep 14, 2018
- Spider: Trachelas tranquillus (Broad-faced Sac Spider)
- Location: Nashua , New Hampshire, United States
- Spotted Outdoors: Low foliage (shrubs, herbs, garden, excluding flowers)
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes: Dorsal
Mar 4, 2023
Oct 20, 2021
Howell, 
Moving our conversation over here so we don’t bother the person who submitted the Eriophora ravilla with it. Sorry I was out and busy most of the day, it’s been a busy week. I’m not familiar with InsectID unless you mean InsectIdentification.org? I haven’t referenced that site in years, too many wonky things on it. ProjectNoah I think is geared toward beginners too, and it has a lot of fun badges if I remember correctly. I think BugGuide has the highest standards for accuracy. I like iNaturalist for tracking down IDs for spiders outside of North America, I have to… Read more »
Thanks! I’ve had an ongoing discussion with another Spiderid user about Itsy Bitsy’s gender. I argued that no male would willingly use that user name, way too emasculating! You’ve been clearly female to me from the way you write. I haven’t tried iNaturalist. Their image recognition feature is said to work well. I have a relative who works for The Nature Conservancy. She said they highly recommend that app Yes, I meant insectidentification.org. They are very detailed in a way that is great scientifically, but even with experience I find it a bit intimidating in the prior knowledge and credentials… Read more »
I must have missed that, yeah … not a lot of men would deliberately go by this handle. I don’t even see any place for user contibutions/IDs on InsectID, I see incorrect spider IDs though. Lecturing a guy in a suit in a swamp does sound pretty funny. iNaturalist or Project Noah might be good for your photo hobby too since they cover plants also. Sorry to hear about your injury. I don’t think I’ve been called creepy much or often but have certainly been called “weird” more than a few times over the years, I try to put up… Read more »
Hi! I’ve been reading the guidelines from the American Arachnological Society Committee onCommon Names of Arachnids. I’ve gotta get a life! Our site doesn’t follow the guidelines for many of the common names in our “spiders” section. BTW, that section could use a more enlightening heading. So could, “pictures.” Do we have contact with the administrator? I would like to adopt the guidelines, such as: no hyphens, no capitalization in a common name unless it is a pronoun, like Hentz. Common names that are systematically incorrect should be compounded, such as: whipscorpion rather than whip scorpion. I’m willing to go… Read more »
I have a printout of the AAS common names handbook and reference it when filling out species pages. The hyphens serve a practical purpose and allow for better search results. Our species page for Herpyllus ecclesiasticus includes the AAS interpretation of Parson Spider (although it’s capitalized) and opts instead for “Eastern Parson Spider” as the preferred common name (I think the AAS booklet needs to be updated) … Eastern Parson Spider is an accepted common name for H. ecclesiasticus, and Western Parson Spider refers to H. propinquus. I may use “Parson Spider” to refer to any similar such species of… Read more »
The contact form should be used for contacting the administrator (Kyle). It’s possible he just doesn’t have the time to dedicate to this site right now and isn’t checking his email. This is a good place to practice spider IDs but a lot of the other big entomology/naturalist sites need help IDing spiders too, so if you want to start filling out info pages and such it may be worth helping in multiple places in case things don’t improve here.
Thanks for explaining. I just read the long argument thread on Bugguide on this topic. They don’t appear to have come to agreement, but settled for capitalizing each word as in treating the common name as a pronoun. The argument for that style makes sense. A cross orb-weaver sounds angry. Cross Orb-weaver is better. I favor using hyphens though they have been in decreasing use in English-speaking countries.
I like the capitals because it makes it easier to find the common names if I’m scanning text and it highlights that it is the common name, and not just a description … oh, you’ve found a common house spider…. or, you’ve found a Common House Spider, it makes it special, a little like capitlizing “Happy Birthday!” I imagine it makes it easier to remember the names too.
His ears must have been burning. I heard from Kyle this afternoon, he has been busy but still intends on updating the site. He also mentioned he had a huge backlog of emails from the site he needs to read, so you may hear back from him yet if he makes it through them all.