MichiganSpiders.Blogspot.com has moved to https://usaspiders.com/

Wanted - Looking for these Spiders

I have mentioned these two spiders in previous comments and articles. I have personally seen both of these spiders in Madison Heights, Michigan, but have not seen either in over 30 years. I have looked for other spiders like these on-line but have yet to find the same ones. If anyone should know what kind they are, or better yet, should ever catch one, please let me know. The following pictures are those of Black Widows, that I changed in Photoshop to look like the spiders I caught as a kid. The Black Widow had the same body shape but the patterns did not match.


WANTED SPIDER #1
I have seen this spider twice in my life. One of those times I caught it in a jar with a friend and the other just happened to be on Halloween night and it was hanging from a guys screen door handle. When he closed his screen door, I saw it fall out of the outer handle and hang from a web then crawl back up the web and into the handle. I tried to point it out to my friends but it had disappeared before they looked and nobody believed me that there was a spider.

I am not sure if the yellow spots were in line in rows or scattered. The spider was the same structure as this picture, a deep shiny black, just like the Black Widow, but it did not have any patterns of the typical Black Widow or the Northern Black Widows and did not have the red markings underneath. Its only markings were the yellow dots on the abdomen. 

WANTED SPIDER #2
This spider I have only seen once. In fact, it was the same day as we caught the other spider. My friend and I had several spiders in one jar and both the black one with yellow spots and this one were in the jar. We caught them in two different places though.

Though this spider had the same structure and size as the spotted spider, this one was not the same color. Instead of being shiny black, it was more of a deep burgundy color and had no other markings.

SIZE
Both of these spiders were the two largest spiders we had caught. If memory serves me right, (legs included) I would say they were larger than the size of a quarter.