Lost part of my camera! But I got the shot. (High spider factor)

[FeathersMcGraw]

Cool -- One of these built a huge web in the bushes outside my front door, and I've been wondering what it was. Thanks for the information and photography.

 

[Nitemare]

Originally posted by: edro13
Here is my garden spider!

Grrr!

Dayum, somebody needs to go on a diet

 

[Ogg]

Yeah and shave their legs........

 

[fonzinator]

Lirion...you da man! Your photography skills are killer!! Thanks for sharing with us. My parent's house has a small patch of cat tails on a drainage ditch. I was mowing around it one time and noticed a large garden spider. I hopped off the mower to get a closer look. Not two feet away, I noticed another...then another...then another, ect. I counted 32 of these suckers in the cat tail patch?! :Q Garden spiders rock!

 

[Wallydraigle]

Holy thread resurrection Batman!:Q Thanks for all the compliments, stories, pictures, or whatever else you had to share.

The other day while I was out walking I found this. It's obviously a nursery web spider of some kind. Here in Ohio we are supposed to have three species of nursery web spiders in the genus Pisaurina. The common nursery web spider is Pisaurina mira. This is obviously not it. Photos and descriptions of the other two species seem to be lacking, so I don't know which it is. What's strange about this spider is that it's much darker and redder than the common nursery web spider. It is also much larger. This is the largest spider I have ever seen in the wild. If it were sitting on a piece of paper and you drew a circle around it, it would be more than four inches in diameter. That's huge for a spider in Ohio. It was so big that when it moved you could hear it rustling on the leaf. That big ball under her is her thousands of young resting close together. I hope some of them live, because I've never seen this species around here before so it must be rare in my locale.

 

[Wallydraigle]

Today I found a banded Argiope (Argiope trifasciata). In my area these don't seem to be nearly as common as Argiope aurantia, but they're not really rare either I guess. They also don't seem to get quite as large. They prefer drier sites than the common garden spider.

Here are a couple views of it here, and here.

These shots are an example of when my 180mm macro lens is just too long. The spider's web was in the tall grass close to the ground, facing down, and I almost couldn't get far enough away from it because the ground was in the way. Also since I was so far away from it that gave the grass plenty of room to get between the lens and the spider. If I could have gotten lower I could have got a better angle and made the eyes more pronounced.