Conspicuous Spiders of Orange County

Identification Guide

Lenny Vincent, Professor Emeritus, Fullerton College

Qualifiers

My pictorial guide to the common and conspicuous spiders of Orange County, California is a work in progress. As time permits, I will add new photos of spiders and notes on their natural history. It is designed to serve my Biology 104 (Biology of Insects and Spiders at Fullerton College) students as well as Orange County naturalists and residents.

I indicate spiders as being found in natural habitats if my students, colleagues, or I have found them there or if they are mentioned in the literature (especially Prentice et al. 1998 and 2001) as being collected in natural areas.

Immature spiders in most cases will not be shown since they are often too difficult to identify. Spider sizes are given in millimeters. Only the length of the spider from the front of the head to the tip of the abdomen is recorded. To obtain the size of spiders that I did not measure, I mostly used Kaston (1978). The blue ruler used in many photos is in millimeters.

Spiders do not respect political borders. Most of the spiders illustrated here can be found in proximal areas of adjacent counties. Some, or closely related species, can be found in adjacent states or even throughout the US.

Adult male bolas spider, Mastophora cornigera, on a pin head.

Acknowledgments

Many colleagues have either provided me with some spider identifications or have verified some of my identifications. For this help, I thank Charlie Dondale, G. B. Edwards, Rosemary Gilespie, Charles Griswald, Joel Ledford, Wayne Maddison, Tom Prentice, David Richman, Joey Slowik, Darrell Ubick, and The House of Vetter. I thank all my former Biology 104 students, Peter Bryant, and Greg Stewart for collecting some of the spiders used in this guide. Thanks also to Renaldo Espinosa and Mike Martinez both for collected spiders and enjoyable field trips. Mostly I thank David Vincent, my first webmaster, for his time and expertise in developing an earlier version of this guide, correcting my data errors, and for his time in data input. (“Aw Shucks, twas nothing.”) and Shari Appleman, my current webmaster, who significantly redesigned this guide.

Photos: Above: Adult female jumping spider Phidippus californicus. Left: Adult male bolas spider, Mastophora cornigera, on a pin head.