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banana spider?

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it's a BIGGUN about 4 inches

We all way just called them garden spider.

Argiope aurantia, that's a female. Harmless. She'll be laying an eggsac before long, probably off to the side.

we have fun catching grasshoppers and tossing them into the web if these monsters! Man, they wast no time wrapping the hoppers up!!!

Those things are BIG and creapy!!

The kind that should be DEAD!

might be creepy, its pretty cool looking though.

we called them dancing spiders.

if you get close enough to them or touch their web a few times, they will start bouncing their web and moving back and forth.
we used to love feeding those things insects that we would find.
they get huge

I've always called them garden spiders. They are harmless and consume large qtys of moths, grasshoppers, flies, even wasps. At the end of the summer they will build a big egg wad like in "Charlotte's Web". Leave it along and start watching it closely early the next spring. Watching the spiders hatch and fly away on web parachutes is also very cool.

just another ugly one

GOLDEN ORB

dead one