Describing Your Spider

Whenever possible, if you can send a picture, that is the optimal way for me to help identify your spiders. However, I understand perfectly well, it is not always possible to get a picture. Some people do a decent job of describing their spiders but some others do not. So I thought I would offer a few tips on describing your spider.

1) Color and markings. Any special markings can often be a quick way to identifying a spider. The Zebra like black and white stripes of some Jumping Spiders for instance. The red hourglass of the Black Widow (though I don't expect you to see those in Michigan too often).

2) Body shape and Legs. Some spiders have long legs and others short. Some spiders have round abdomens and others have smaller thin or lengthy abdomens.

3) Size can help. It is not real important but more than just saying the size, what helps is what you are describing about the size. Is the body the size of a nickle or does that include the legs too? Are the legs around the same length at the body or twice as long?

4) The hardest thing to describe, but very helpful if you can do it, is the eye pattern. Many spiders have eight eyes but some have only six. Some spiders have two horizontal rows of four eyes each but the Wolf Spider for instance is quite different. They have one horizontal row of four smaller eyes. Above those is a pair of larger eyes and again above those is another pair of medium sized eyes.

5) If you see the spider in a web, it can even help to say if the web is a round vertical web, a flat horizontal sheet, does it end in a funnel shape? Maybe the web looks like a scattered mess?

No one of these alone can identify a spider. Two of these may and may not be enough to identify your spider. The more info you can give, the easier it is to identify a spider, but even if you give every one of these, it is not a guarantee that it will be identified. In some cases it just cannot be identified by a description, but the more you can give the better the chances.