Talk:Identifying spiders

clean-up

The obnoxious clean-up notice was added within minutes of the article being started and gives no indication whatsoever of what the complaint is. Recently someone added "has been marked since June", which is one more form of nastiness and unhelpfulness. Please use some restraint in applying these "ain't worth a tinker's dam" messages. They are not helpful unless they are specific. P0M 06:38, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

hey, in the german WP they *deleted* an article i had started *twice* *within 10 minutes* before i could add to it. --Sarefo 01:51, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

spider found

I found a black with brown bands spider and a tan colored heart shape on it's back. I did not kill it because I have a healthy respect for their job. I am just curious to the type of spider it is crawlering around my home signed,

                                         Albany,Ny
                                        Gold Baby

You didn't say how long its body was, so I'm guessing it was fairly large, maybe 3/4 of an inch long just counting the cephalothorax and the abdomen. A very high percentage of spiders are shades of black and brown, so that part of the description doesn't narrow things down very much. By heart shape I guess you mean it resembled the Valentine-type heart. I've never seen a spider with that kind of a pattern on its abdomen. (I'm guessing that's the part of the body where you saw it.) There are several genera of spiders that spend most of their time crawling on the ground (or on the floor if they find their way indoors). Then there are a few more genera in which the females stay at home in some kind of a shelter and the males are the only ones you'd be likely to see wandering around on the ground.

One of the curious things about people's interests in spiders is that lots of people study their classification, but frequently very little is known about their behavior. If you have a spider that makes regular appearances in your home, you might be able to make interesting observations of it. I once had a spider house guest that I had to rescue from my bathtub nearly every day. She had evidently learned that the bathtub was a place where she could find water, so she kept coming back. Since she didn't hang around there after I helped her climb the side of the bath tub, I have to assume that she went somewhere else that interested her (or at least she went away from the huge monster), but also that she knew where the bathtub was and could find her way back to it. I had always wondered how spiders managed to make it through the winter in my house without rain water to drink. Her behavior provided at least one answer.

It would be interesting if you could get a photo of him/her. I'm guessing that s/he is a wolf spider, but that's just because they are the most common ones to get noticed. P0M 01:47, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Inappropriate tone

This article reads like a how-to - please fix this! Adding WP:RS references may help you to make the tone better, as well. -Malkinann 09:44, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

What does "a how-to" mean? P0M 14:41, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

It's an often informal style of writing that tells you 'how to' do something - a recipe is a how to, for example. See WP:TONE for the kind of tone we'd like in wiki articles, and WP:NOT#IINFO for what is a "how-to". While a how-to is out of place on Wikipedia, it could easily fit in at Wikibooks. -Malkinann 20:07, 13 March 2007 (UTC)