Have seen several spiders around the outside of my home in Massachusetts. Looks very much like a picture of a brown widow I saw on the web. (I live in a wooded area with wetlands). Is it possible that this is a brown widow, or another in the family? Could not see the underbelly, but has the same shape, reddish brown in color, "striped" legs, and is about the size of a quarter.
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Brown Widow in New England?
tmva1
Sep 02, 2003 05:59 PM
Replies (2)
Venom
Sep 04, 2003 05:42 PM
New England is too cool for the brown widow, which hails from tropical Africa, and also inhabits the warm southern USA ( Texas, Florida, etc. ) What you probably have is an American house spider, Achaearanea tepidariorum. It looks a lot like the brown widow ( it is a closely related species ) and gets almost as large. Check out this site for a picture of the house spider ( copy and paste it into your browser's address bar ) :
http://www.enature.com/guides/show_species_fg.asp?beautyID=8467&recsFound=28&curPos=1&curGroup=Insects_and_Spiders&screenType=normal&guideID=ng&recNum=IS0105&searchType=&color=&size=&shape=593&leafShape=&fruit=&habitat=&range=&useFreeText=&freeText=
combfoot
Oct 10, 2003 10:30 PM
It could be a house, but they dont seem to be that color very often. I beleive you are describing a false widow, in the genus Steatoda. Cant remember sp. but we have ones that look almost exactly like what you describe. Ill look through my computer to see if i have some pictures.
