I came across this little beast last weekend. At first I was a little concerned. I thought it was a brown recluse, which would have been a concern because along with the black widows it’s the only seriously venomous spider in the US. I was once bitten by a spider, which produced a painful, necrotic sore that took some time to heal. At the time my wife had been visiting South Africa quite a bit, and I thought that she had perhaps brought back a poisonous spider in her luggage (I found a picture of a South African spider that looked very much like the one that had bitten me). I have since begun to wonder if it might not have a been a brown recluse.

However, on further consideration I no longer think the spider above is a brown recluse. It doesn’t seem to have the typical brown recluse markings on the dorsal side of its cephalothorax: a black line coming from it that looks like a violin with the neck of the violin pointing to the rear of the spider, resulting in the nicknames fiddleback spider, brown fiddler, or violin spider. And the eyes don’t look right for a brown recluse. Also the abdomen of a brown recluse looks longer, almost tubular where this one has a more globe like abdomen.

I don’t really know what it is. Maybe a common house spider? Or some kind of orb weaver?

Taken with a Sony A77II and Minolta 50mm f2.8 Macro lens

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