Enlarge Picture
Family
Genus
Species
Apr 21, 2019
Apr 21, 2019
Little brak River, South Africa
1 Comments
Enlarge Picture
Family
Genus
Species
Jan 22, 2024Jan 22, 2024Cape Town, South Africa5 Comments
Enlarge Picture
Family
Genus
Species
Mar 31, 2019Mar 31, 2019Cape Town, South Africa1 Comments
Enlarge Picture
Family
Genus
Species
Mar 30, 2019Mar 30, 2019
George, Eastern Cape , South Africa1 Comments
Login
Register
I am no spider expert by any means and also totally new to this site but this spider looked really cool to me so I just spent a couple hours figuring it out. I think this is Trichonephilia Fenestrata (Hairy Golden Orbweaver) and I’m even going to take a stab at subspecies. I think it’s the Southern Blackleg Orbweaver. This has to be a female, and it’s the ventral side. Please someone correct me if any of that is wrong!
Clever, Welcome to Spider ID! You got it! I like this species, it looks so big and calm. I can’t go to subspecies level, I didn’t know it had any. Yes this is the ventral plane. The Anatomy class I took in high school is useful here. 🙂 This is probably a female, female spiders are much more often photographed than males. The gals are giants compared to males and they live much longer and hunt where we might see them. The little males spend their lives trying to get one of these big ladies to mate with them. We’re… Read more »
@TangledWeb I edited my other comment too much, but I think maybe you can delete either this or the other one since you’re a moderator… Heres a copy: I found their subspecies listed on Wikipedia and just googled for photos, but looking back I’m even more confident that it’s a southern blackleg orbweaver (the other two subspecies are eastern and western) because I have now used the maps of habitats on inaturalist and its much much more likely to be a southern. Very confident this is a female both because of size like you said, but also the males appear… Read more »
I can’t get the tag to work… At least on my end it’s not actually a link. Oh well.
I can’t add a subspecies, the site isn’t progammed for that. What you wrote is the way we do it, people can refer to what you said. Please don’t worry about the first post. We leave the posts intact as we discuss and reconsider to show our thought process, like my math teachers used to make us do, “show your work.” No, editing doesn’t work except when you are still logged on. Then the cog symbol can give you the option to edit what you just wrote after you hit Enter, but only during the same session. The ratings symbols… Read more »