We've stumbled upon this site quite by accident, but have a set of 4 interesting photos from a brief visit we had with an
elegant spider. It seems a perfect place to share them, but we see no appropriate forum (spiders not being insects) ...so we'll just begin here with one picture and see where it leads.
We believe he (she?) was an Orb Weaver (Araneidae), though we're not certain at all. The piece of trim to which the spider is clinging measures an inch and a half in width. So, you can see it was pretty large, as spiders go.
The trim abuts the metal gate to our back yard near Berkeley, California, and the gate is covered with a climbing vine of some sort which, like this marvelous creature, is unique, splendidly exotic and completely unknown to us. The vine and gate are about 8 feet from a small marshland creek that runs through an underground culvert which opens and spill out onto rocks just at the edge of our back yard. Neither of us have any recollection of the weather conditions that night, but typically the creek, as it exits the culvert, is little more than a trickle at that time of the year.
S/he visited on the night of 10/10/07 and at the time we wondered if there was any association between the vine or the creek and the spider. However, we've never seen such a spider in or around our yard before and certainly have not seen one since.
From our online searching (see
http://bugguide.net/node/view/1972/tree), there appears to be about 27 genuses (genae?) in the Araneidae family, so we still have some exploring to do.
If anyone has any ideas to contribute, including suggestions about where better to explore the identity of this spider, we would appreciate your thoughts.
Ed n Lisa
