Awesome Argiope

Finally: a spider I can actually identify without working! Garden spider or Argiope aurantia. These things are awesome. This one - along with several of her sisters - is in our yard. We had a sac of them hatch on our porch a year ago, so maybe she is one of them, or an offspring of one.

This site has great pictures. 

Square web

The flash I used washed out much of the spider detail, but this one had some very cool features.

The spider guarded a long sac which appeared to be a bunch of egg sacs strung together (shown best in the last picture).

The web itself (a large one for the size of spider) was a combination of a very fine netlike web and a bunch of loose unorganized support strands. The middle picture shows a feature my husband Bill noticed - the web strands crisscross one another to form squares. This was something neither of us had seen before. It actually took me a while to see the effect even after Bill pointed it out.
 

Yellow on Orange

This spider was in my friend Bev's garden. Isn't it gorgeous against the orange of the flower petal!?

I am going to have to start making some effort to ID these spiders, I guess. Shouldn't be too hard, as all the ones I have so far are, I think, very common in North Carolina. 

Funnel web spiders

I have been trying for the past few days to get good pics of the spiders we see in our morning walks in the woods - with mixed results, as you see here (these pics are 2 different spiders).

The large spiders - they are silver-dollar sized - make large (several feet across at the top) funnel webs. They usually sit at the base of the funnel or even farther out - until the camera comes out, that is. Then they run and hide in the mouth of the funnel where it's difficult to shoot them :-/

One day I will be patient enough to set up the camera on one of the new tripods and wait for the spider to re-emerge fully and shoot the perfect picture, but for now I wanted to share these less-than-perfect shots taken hastily while my husband was yelling at me to catch up, and my dogs were trying to get me to go along with them. But I hope you get the idea. Enjoy!

Dropping in for dinner

I was having dinner at a friend's house last night, and this fellow was on the ceiling above the table. I put him outside on this post where he obliged me with a nice pose before jumping away. Jumping spiders are so cute, but not on the dinner plate!

Wolf Spider: The Next Generation

A wolf spider carrying its baby spiderlings on its back. The fibers sticking to the spider's legs are probably dog hairs, as it came from (and returned to, despite several attempts to put it outside) under our couch. 

Lunch with a friend

Here is Sam the Spider, whose picture was taken by Pete Stavros. Thanks, Pete!

Pete says:

I took this one in my garage when I was trying different things with my new digital camera. This spider lived in my garage the whole summer and fall of '05 till the cold did him in in early December.
Hope you enjoy. 

Spider lair

Unfortunately, I could not find the tenant of this web, but I'll try again later today perhaps. It was right near the ground in some weeds. I only saw it by chance as I was trying to get my old beagle's nose out of something interesting/gross.

Kitchen spider

This spider lived all of last winter and into the spring in our kitchen window. It made an irregular crazy-woven web, good at catching dust as well as flies. Still, it was good to have a spider for company when washing dishes.

In this picture the spider is showing its usefulness as a predator of annoying household pests. This was a particularly good hunting day!