Does Anyone Know What Kind Of Spider This Is? Is It Dangerous?

[redhen]

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Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Now i need to go potty....

 

[Iowa Roo Mom]

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[country freedom]

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How large are those HUGE spiderlings! SHUDDERS!

I keep telling everyone living with me that I DO NOT want a sofa they sell nowadays. I really want a bench with cushions (no ties) - why does my family think I am weird?
I have had it with trying to move a sofa twice daily to sweep under it, much less tip it so I can sweep the underside. I have issues with spiders, resulting from my personal horror experiences!

Norfolk VA has large grayish/blackish fat-tailed spiders that spin very thick sticky webs in crevices and holes, and will take up residence in your house!
My house was infested with them, spiderlings and adults!
New spiderlings of this spider is as large as my finger pinky nail.

I won't go into detail with my horror stories with these fat-tails, but this pic takes the cake and runs with it!

 

[dieselgrl48]

Waaaa the pic Iowa put up Sqeeerrrry!.I am trying to be a Recovering Arachnaphobic. I used to be terrified! Since moving to the farm 6 year's ago I have been working on it.I tried to get a couple pic's of my new found Au Nat'Uareul Fly traps but stinking camera wont pick them up good..I have one here in my window in comp. room and another has taken up residence under my 2nd desk where I sew.They are just common little I call them Charlotte spider's.The one under desk is going out tomm. I guess it's just here and no food.The window one has a big pile of flie's in corner.There are Apparently several hundred varieties of spiders in N. America.We have a lot of Orb,funnel varietie's here which is most like what you have they are harmless and just building web to catch food.We have found a couple of black widows and see brown recluse here too.Sorry I either get the raid or my Croc's for those.

 

[Imp]

Redhen must be right. Spider caught bird.

 

[chicken_china_mom]

We discovered last summer that we have Orb Weavers here in Indiana. We happened to be picking some apricots at my neighbor's spare lot a block away, and where we had to go to get to the trees, we had to pass by some weeds and shrubs. I was stopped dead in my tracks when I spotted what I thought was a BIG spider. As I was observing it and showing it to my kids, my DD gasped next to me and pointed to the underside of the bush where a spider nearly 3 times the size of the one I was looking at had a web! We were amazed and enjoyed watching them for several minutes before moving on to pick the fruit. A few days later my older DD went around the side of our house where our mint is planted and she came running back to the house screaming excitedly about a spider on the side of the house. I followed her outside and much to my surprise we had a spider just like the one we had seen a few days earlier at my neighbor's, but it was even bigger! I went back inside and looked her up, and discovered that she was a Golden Orb Weaver. She was amazing and we went out and checked on her daily all summer long. She left in the early fall, no egg casings that I noticed being left behind, and we never saw her again. I miss her, she was doing an excellent job of eating up all the japanese beetles that were eating my mint. I have no problems with spiders. I respect them. Redhen, you'd never want to step foot in my basement or in my bathroom, both are breeding grounds for the daddy longlegs. I have TONS of them. They are in my shower too and I get a kick out of them when they come down to watch us shower. We call spiders George around here because when I was a little girl living in Chicago I had a teeny little albino spider that lived in my bathroom and I would talk to him. Every time we went in the bathroom, he/she would come out and watch us. Whether we were washing our hands, brushing our teeth, etc, he would come out from behind this little cabinet that my mom kept on the back of our toilet, and he/she would just sit there watching us. It was super tiny and not scary at all. I've taught my kids about a lot of the spider varieties. We got a little too close to a black widow spider a few years ago when we were hiking a trail up to the Garden of the Gods in the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. My mom didn't want to hike the trail with us, so it was just myself and my two daughters who were maybe 7 and 8 at the time. My younger DD was admiring the rock formations and thought they looked like mushrooms. She stopped at this one that was high enough that she could clearly see the underside of the rock, and she says "Mommy, what kind of spider is this?" So I back track to see what she's pointing at, and I bend a little so that I can look under the rock too, and my breath caught in my throat. It was a shiny black spider, and when I moved just a little to the side I saw a red hourglass on it's belly. Oh boy, I grabbed my daughter by the arm and yanked her probably 4 ft in the air to get as far away as possible from that rock! She looked at me in surprise and I explained "Honey, that was a black widow spider." She knew what that was, I'd already told her, and she turned ten shades of white and swallowed hard. She then hurried up the path avoiding every rock on the way, lol. We were careful on our way back down the path too, but it was gone when we came back like twenty minutes later. My friend later put the fear of God in me when she said "You know those things can jump, right?" I was like NOOOOOO, I didn't know that!!! And my daughter's finger had been close enough to poke the darn thing before I yanked her away! Eeek! Only spider I've been scared of though. I know where we are we have brown recluses, wolf spiders, orb weavers, jumping spiders, and a whole host of other spiders. We co-exist with them peacefully and I rarely ever get bitten. Though whoever mentioned getting bitten by the brown recluses over and over, you got me thinking. My older DD hid something from me for about a week before the pain became too much to bear about three years ago. She came to me one evening and said she had a bump on her leg that hurt real bad. So I had her pull her pants down far enough for me to see it (it was on her upper, outer thigh) and I gasped in horror. She had what I can only describe as a bubble almost the diameter of a dime on her thigh. The area around it was badly infected and the skin was so swollen and full of pus that the skin on the bubble was actually transparent and you could see green and yellow pus inside it. I have zero medical background so I asked my mom to lance it and try to drain it. She did, and we stood there in complete shock as we watched all the pus come out. Seriously, there enough to fill at least two tablespoons, and finally it began to run clear, and we cleaned it up, put some neosporin on it, and covered it. A few days later she said it was hurting again so we checked it and it had filled up again, so we lanced it and drained it, and this time cut the bubble skin so it would continue to drain and not fill up. It took a long time to heal and left her with a scar. It's a black scar too, but my daughter is half Puerto Rican and tends to scar dark. I didn't know if she had bumped herself, or if it was MRSA, or what. After reading this thread though, I find myself wondering if she didn't have a run in with a brown recluse. I didn't see a bite mark, but like I said, she hid it from me for nearly a week before it bothered her enough to say something.

I'm picky about vacuuming though, mainly because the dog and cat hair drives me insane, but I'll be extra careful around my furniture and make extra sure that I make the effort to move my couch and chairs to vacuum under them.

Oh, and for the record, I researched wolf spiders when we moved in here because they were everywhere, and I found out that they have a bad rep for really no reason at all. They are shy and not dangerous to humans at all. They keep the ants off my patio, so I don't mind them. And they eat up all those pesky moths, so I have no issue with them.

 

[Rare Feathers Farm]

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Except for the black widows! LOL

I learned that you cannot climb a tile wall while in the shower to escape one that's just slid out of the shower curtain across the top of your foot!

 

[Imp]

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Except for the black widows! LOL

I learned that you cannot climb a tile wall while in the shower to escape one that's just slid out of the shower curtain across the top of your foot!

That is so true RFF. I don't think we have black widows on this side of the mountains. I've heard you only have to watch for them on produce.

Imp- betcha Redhen can climb a tile wall to get away from black widows.

 

[Iowa Roo Mom]

You must not have the same kind of wolf spiders we do, cause around here, they ain't shy, and they ain't harmless! I got bit by one years ago in girl scouts- swoll my whole toe up. It was red, hot, and hurt like fire.

Wolf spiders are the root of all evil, near as I can tell.

 

[Ec_Prokta]

Kill it with fire!! *runs away screaming* Spiders should NEVER be big, on your face or other body parts, and be white and red! This guy is all of them!