Borneo? The Zoo? Nope, just our wild adventure backyard. This must be the largest spider that I have ever seen in person. Its web goes from the top of our house to the top of the neighbor’s. Her fire red orange was particularly vivid in the late afternoon sun today.
Sarah also came in today to say that there was a spider in her sandbox. I found a black widow belly up in the sand, but when I poked her she sprang to life. So many different spiders here in sunny San Diego, and I have no idea why.
What is your best spider story? Have you ever kept a pet spider? I know at least one of you has!
update: our previous eight legged friend appears to have moved on. We visited for a couple of weeks, but his funnel shaped web is getting dusty and he is no longer in sight.
posted by ALS
12 Comments
Look at that huge spider!
Weren’t you introduced on occasion to our pet black widow that we kept for a while? We actually had two. The first one Nate inadvertantly drown (we found that one out back by the hose), the second one (found on the front porch by the birdhouse) we had for a full six months. We would catch flies to feed her, but decided to let her starve after she figured out where the food came from. She would hover at the top of the peanut butter jar and lunge like lightening when you’d try to open the lid. It got too scary, but was interesting while it lasted. =^) Any others we found got a watery, insecticide death.
Oh, Andy, you’re always such a wealth of knowledge!
that looks like it’s so large you’d need a shotgun to get rid of it!
We found a camel spider at the church one time. Nobody knew what it was so I investigated on the Internet. It was so ugly and we weren’t even sure it was a spider at first. Thankfully it wasn’t near as big as what they have shown from Iraq and it wasn’t moving fast like they say. We have also found a few black widows at the schools here in town.
Watch the funnel shape webs..that can be a bad sign. We have the brown recluse here in Oregon, one even bit my cat and cost us alot of money!
I have realized that the funnel webs are (at least around here-Montana) an indication of brown recluse. ugh. I’m usually not afraid of spiders, but Jesse is obsessed and has scoured the internet to show me what they can do!Now that I have seen the result of a recluse bite, I have had numerous nightmares of having a “superhero/spiderman” baby after being bitten by one! Silly! But we do have them all around our foundation and a cement pad and have even found many in our basement! Ugh!
You know you really should have had some sort of scroll down warning…IN BIG TYPE.
[shiver]
YIKES!
seriously…some warning next time please :0
well, isn’t that a very vivid photo??
ew on the black widow in the sandbox! i never thought of them getting in there-yipes!!
I saw a really weird bug. Hard to describe, but it looked kind of like a bald teranchila, but smaller, tan color with a bullet like thing coming out of its back end, probably a stinger.
Forgot one thing, this bug is very harmless. It’s an Orb Weaver that builds an enormous and beautiful web to catch other bugs in. Then they crawl and eats them. Information care of one of my co-workers.