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Comments & ID Thoughts
Found in basement. There happened to be a funnel-ish web nearby, but doesn’t mean it was from this spider. The little Googling I’ve done suggests a Hacklemesh Weaver, or possibly a Wolf Spider (though this doesn’t seem to have enough color variation in the legs?). What is it?
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Feb 7, 2018
- Photographed: Jan 29, 2018
- Spider: Amaurobius ferox (Black Lace-Weaver)
- Sex:
Male, - Maturity:Adult
- Location: New Hampshire, United States
- Spotted Indoors: Basement or Cellar
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes: Dorsal
Feb 11, 2020
Feb 11, 2020
Berkeley Heights, 
Hi, welcome to Spider ID. 🙂 You were right with Hacklemesh Weaver, this is a mature male Amaurobius ferox. This species is also known by the name Black Lace Weaver.
Thanks for the confirmation! I was pretty certain it wasn’t a Wolf Spider. Our kids caught one of those (at least that’s what our best guess was) a summer or two ago, and left it for the afternoon in a container with a plethora of other bugs. When we returned later in the day, the container looked like a scene from a horror movie… dead bugs (and pieces of dead bugs) spread all around, with web everywhere, and a spider happily eating in the middle.
There’s well over 2,400 species of Wolf Spider (Lycosidae), some big, some tiny, some hairy, some not, wide variety of colors and patterns… the placement of the eyes is probably the easiest way to tell if a spider might be a Wolf Spider.
The web was a clue that it wasn’t a Wolf Spider (Lycosidae), assuming it was his web … which it may not have been since he seems to be a wandering male in search of a mate. Maybe he just left his web or a female lives in it. Wolf Spiders usually don’t live in webs, there are some exceptions though … but in North America they’re only found in southern states (Sosippus, Funnel Web Wolf Spiders).