say hello to my little friend...

Thanks Bot! Very nice markings on the belly of those. Oh, and Jason, you are right that there is a spider in South America that is called the "Brown Banana Spider", very dangerous. But, this little guy is not part of that family (googled it), he/she is also called a golden silk spider, very similar to the plain garden spider (but can get as big as your hand) in that they are doscile if left alone, and if you do get bit it's more like a horse fly bite or really weak bee sting.

yeah ..i was jsut noticing the nickname was that of another spider which is poisonous....i mite have seen one b4...mite..
but yeah..

ps Random fact: The blackwidow spider has habit of spinning webs across toilet seats...And has poison 15 times more potent than rattle snake...fun..

They are pretty big beasties - this one was probably almost two inches from top to bottom. I have another tiny spider I'll post as soon as I get the pics up to ericdives.com. It looks pretty cool - spikes and everything, kind of like some weird disguise. I'll try to get them up today.

As per one of the things I read on a googled page, they do spin big webs and do tend to put them between trees - occasionally that span across trails. It's something you have to look out for down here if you geocache a lot.

Spider webs across trails eh?

..

hehe...
Im srry it just reminds me of this comic..-->

hehe..

i think the name of any spider is "run away, run fast and hide" im sorry but those things are just WRONG. And if you can even see a little dot in the distance you are still TOO CLOSE!! RUN away!!!

Since I'm not big on spiders I got this guy... just a grasshopper, but he's cool

They bite hard still..

..I speak form experience..o.0

I have a few grasshoppers - but a week or so ago I took these:

And this dragonfly I originally had from a different angle where the background was black (dark water in the shade, but the dragonfly in the light). It didn't come out well unfortunately ... but this one did:

is that a spider??? That is one wierd looking creature.

Yip...spiders are very varried lil critters

Spinybacked Orbweaver is the common name. Took me a while to find it because I was using "orange" as the spine color instead of "red".

EDIT: Colloquially it's supposedly known as "crab spider", but not actually related to most of the spiders that are "crab spiders".

That is one sweet pic Bot! How big is it? Pyra, you can almost see that grasshopper thinking, peaking over that leaf, "Darn paparazzi, you can't get away from them." LOL

emetakleze wrote:

That is one sweet pic Bot! How big is it? Pyra, you can almost see that grasshopper thinking, peaking over that leaf, "Darn paparazzi, you can't get away from them." LOL

Haha... actually he was quite curious about me. He kept hiding behind the stalk of the plant and peaking out every five seconds, then back to hiding... it was quite amusing.

emetakleze wrote:

That is one sweet pic Bot! How big is it?

I'd say about 10mm - they supposedly vary in size from like 5 to 10 or so.

Lettuce Lake (the park where I took the shot) has a very long boardwalk (mostly over water) that I've walked a few times taking pictures. These guys had webs usually just off the boardwalk - sometimes spanning between the boardwalk and a tree.

For one of them, I had to lean pretty far over the wooden hand rail (3 or so feet up) with my 100mm macro to get anywhere near close to get the shot. The other one I had to poke my head through the guard rails to try and get close enough and get the angle I wanted.

The dragonfly, interestingly enough, was taken with my 70-300mm telephoto - a lens that only cost me around $165 (cheapest version - next step up gets close to $1000). The macro was $500.

Im glad to see others still enjoy the 8 legged critters as I did growing up. I still have my Spiders of the world book in a box somewhere. Loved the things and used to feed them every week around the house outside. Most were Funnel Web, Basement or Garden spiders. Every once in a while a new one would appear somewhere for a while.

Ya, I was a freak. Not anymore, but I still find them fastinating.