Hello all,
I found this guy...er, girl...in my basement yesterday. I kinda recall reading that there aren't any established populations of latrodectus species this far north (I'm ~10 miles from Boston, MA), but when I looked again today I couldn't find a confirmation for that, so I'm not sure. this girl is probably 1.25" DLS, and her abdomen is about the size of a pea, tho she evidently just dropped a sac.
said sac with a *very* fuzzy spider...
i fought with my camera for about 30 minutes and took over 100 pictures, but the lighting was really awful and I don't think my camera does its macro thing anymore. I got three kinda in focus...This is actually in the stairs to my storm doors, and it was leaking water like crazy and I had about 15 different spiders crawl over me...mostly pholcids, but a pretty big wolf spider and i think another one of these took a stroll up my pants legs too...
the first image sort of shows the markings...she has a white stripe running down the middle of the underside of her abdomen, and it looks like two white triangles pointing towards each other on either side of the white line. i haven't been able to get a good look at the top side of her abdomen, but you can see in this image that her legs are banded, and what I have seen of her abdomen is more tan/brown than black.She is always upside down, which I've seen in my L. hesperus and gather is common for most latro species.
So, anyone have a better guess than "some latro species"? cuz thats all i've got.
Thanks in advance!
-philip
I found this guy...er, girl...in my basement yesterday. I kinda recall reading that there aren't any established populations of latrodectus species this far north (I'm ~10 miles from Boston, MA), but when I looked again today I couldn't find a confirmation for that, so I'm not sure. this girl is probably 1.25" DLS, and her abdomen is about the size of a pea, tho she evidently just dropped a sac.
said sac with a *very* fuzzy spider...
i fought with my camera for about 30 minutes and took over 100 pictures, but the lighting was really awful and I don't think my camera does its macro thing anymore. I got three kinda in focus...This is actually in the stairs to my storm doors, and it was leaking water like crazy and I had about 15 different spiders crawl over me...mostly pholcids, but a pretty big wolf spider and i think another one of these took a stroll up my pants legs too...
the first image sort of shows the markings...she has a white stripe running down the middle of the underside of her abdomen, and it looks like two white triangles pointing towards each other on either side of the white line. i haven't been able to get a good look at the top side of her abdomen, but you can see in this image that her legs are banded, and what I have seen of her abdomen is more tan/brown than black.She is always upside down, which I've seen in my L. hesperus and gather is common for most latro species.
So, anyone have a better guess than "some latro species"? cuz thats all i've got.
Thanks in advance!
-philip