smithsonianlibraries: That dance when a big juicy fly gets…

smithsonianlibraries:

That dance when a big juicy fly gets caught in your web…

This is Argiope aurantia, the common yellow garden spider with yellow and black abdominal markings and a white cephalothorax. These spiders are quite common across the United States, [[Argiope argentata, the silver argiope, an orb-weaver found from southern California to Florida in the US, all the way down to Argentina]] and this one in particular is from Plate I in the article “Three Common Spiders of Laguna” by Margaret Moles in The 4th Annual Report of the Laguna Marine Laboratory (1916), which is digitally available in @biodivlibrary

Some folks are posting spider pics on Twitter with the hashtag #ArachnidGotBacknid, and this was our contribution. We’ve got a pretty nice collection in our Entomology Library, a satellite library of the National Museum of Natural History Library.

***oops. Edited for correct species.

…comes the spider after the fly…