American house spider

Description:

This was a beautiful specimen that had woven its web between a ten-foot tree, about seven feet up, and then anchored it to the ground with a number of strands, over an area approximately seven feet high by six feet across. The center of the spider's web was only about two feet from a branch of the tree, as viewed in the second image. This image was captured with the sun behind me.

Habitat:

The American house spider may be found throughout the Americas: North; Central; and South.

Notes:

Due to some light wind that was blowing the spider and its web about, I used a tripod. While taking images, the wind picked up; and the spider moved toward a limb. I had to move my camera and tripod to a position where the sun was at about 10 o'clock. This resulted in an image in which the spider's thin legs and cephalothorax were brightly colored with some light shining through. However, its abdomen was dark due to its being on the back side of the sunlight and too thick for any light to be seen through it. In the first image, the spider appears to be suspended in mid-air. However, it is crawling across its web, which appears only in very small bits, as I focused on the spider and not on its web in this image.