About a year and half ago me and my friend caught a massive hobo spider at work. Much larger than any other one i've ever seen on the internet or in person. We took it to Portland State University, and they said they had never heard of one as big as the one I had. I had it for about a year before it died. I'm gonn abe rebuilding my deck in the backyard and it's quite old. So i'm expecting to find a large one under there(because that's were they are prone to be, cold dark places). I'm gonna try to catch it lol(cuz I like spiders.) Hopefully I don't get bit, cuz they are the fastest spiders in the country and one of the most poisioness(when you get bit, it's like a Brown recluse bit, it deteriorates the flesh and meat and anything else it contacts.) So if I get bit in the hand I wont be playin cs for a while lol.

Here's the old one. It's about an inch and a half bigger in diameter when fully extended than a pop can. Maybe 2 inches(most only get to about an inch and a half to 2 inches in diameter.) So it's very large. She might not look curled up, but her legs are no were near extended(I only say she, cuz the marking on it's back and color are the way you determine sex.) If ya can't tell I have fun catching spiders, since I live next to a big field and our house get's a lot of them in the summer, so the season is almost here and i'm starting to see some already!

ok...i don't mind spiders but wow I think I'd be freaked out by that one walkn around :/

lol ya, it's about 4-5 times the size of a normal one. Super thick legs and the abdomen was like a dime in width right before it laid eggs(like 6 times, so i'de open the cage pull out the eggs and burn them lol) I found it while we were taring out a 15 year old fence at work. It just sat there and it was never really aggrivated by people. Just other hobo spiders I put in there for lunch lol.

Making this as my desktop to freak out my roommate, she's really really really afraid of spiders.

Might wanna crop out all the white shit. Forgot to do that myself.

That's so goddamn cool, spiders are awesome.

F*CK spiders in there face!!

Dirk I bet with were you live, you could catch some knarly ones out there! Just because they aren't disturbed at all and they have all the freedom they need to grow haha. If you have any wood laying around that's were they'll be. Or along the foundation of your house cuz they only connect there funnel webs to concrete and solid wood. If you see a thick web with an oval shapped funnel you found one! :o

My cat's a big fan of spiders. He eats them on sight.

I do have wood piles and in fact jhust the other day I was moving one around, but no spiders or snakes :(

my specific part of the forest is really weird though-- we don't have poison ivy/oak, very few or no poison snakes, very few if any bear. the biggest danger where I live (specifically-- go to the other side of mt hood and you get rattlers, poison oak, etc) is a tree falling on you.

i have yet to see a spider bigger than a quarter here.

Damn that's weird. They could be under you house or something I guess. That's akward for being out there not to really have much of anything. But it's good at the same time. Cuz you won't have much to worry about. You talking about like the eastern side of Mt Hood ? Like torwards the Warm Springs reservation ? I'de expect rattlers there since it's a desert pretty much. Next time I go to Bend i'll keep an eye out :) I just wanna see a wild Rattler in person, up close, but not to close haha.

Haha, I'm highly arachnophobic and that picture almost made me puke. No lie. I was bit by a spider when I was in high school and had a really bad reaction to it. All of my joints swelled and I puffed out like the marshmellow man. I missed Lollapalooza that year(1996) because of it. Here are the bands I missed because of that F*CKING spider.

Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, Metallica, Cocteau Twins, Waylon Jennings, Cheap Trick, Violent Femmes, The Tea Party, Wu Tang Clan, Steve Earle, Devo, The Ramones, Rancid, Shaolin Monks, Screaming Trees, Psychotica

F*CK Spiders!

I'm SW side of Hood. NW, North, and NE (along the columbia gorge) have all the nasty shit. My part is very clean, relatively speaking.

Oh God... I thought i was the only one. I F*CKING hate spiders more than anything on this planet. The scariest movie ive ever scene was 8-legged freaks. Im deathly afraid of them....

I F*CKIN HATE spiders! Call me a little bitch, but I don't care. I've been freaked out by spiders ever since I can remember!
Oh, and to make it worse, everyone at work found this out, so when I was down in Lemoore, CA, for some schooling, a bunch of people I work with kept F*CKIN with me by throwing dead Black Widows (and a live one or two) in my direction and watching me freak out. lol. I hope all spiders in the world get ass cancer and die!

I don't mind little spiders, or even big ones safely behind glass where I can stand in horrified delight as I watch it do its thing. HOWEVER: Big ones = no bueno. Especially if they are in my house, or worse, my car. True story:

I had left the parking lot at work a few years back and was driving home. Suddenly, I noticed something crawl out from under my windshield wiper. It was a wolf spider, about 4 inches across. This is what it looked like:


It hung out there, I watched it carefully for a few miles. I stopped at a light, and it decided to book it towards the driver's side window. I was cool with this, but then, as it ran closer, I realized that MY WINDOW WAS DOWN!!!! At this point I had gotten on the highway and I frantically was jabbing the button to put the window up and...too late. The giant spider buttonhooked around the edge of the window AND INTO MY CAR. I was going about 60 at this point and it was a miracle that I didn't wreck or kill anyone else as I screamed and hurtled across 3 lanes of traffic and off the road. I jumped out, looked for it, didn't see it ANYWHERE. It took all the guts I had to get back in the car and drive home, I was so paranoid that it would get on me and at that point I'd probably either die of a heart attack or take a bunch of people out. When I opened the car door, IT WAS SITTING ON THE RUNNING BOARD AREA and it reared up onto its hind legs and waved its feet at me! I was out the other door so fast I don't even remember doing it. So then it disappears again. Over the next few weeks that damn thing lived in the door frame and would pop out at the worst moments...I think it was trying to kill me. I finally went to whack it one day when I saw it on the door before I got in and it dropped off and ran into the bushes.

Thats my spider story.

Oh, and be careful what spiders you go to catch, unless you know a lot about different types. This link takes you to a page where there is a progression of a brown recluse spider bite on some poor dude's thumb over 10 days. It is EXTREMELY GRAPHIC and scary, I have a stomach of iron and it nearly made me sick.

http://www.easygopest.com/fiddleback/default.htm

BE CAREFUL all who like the spiders...

Ya, I know a lot about spiders. I know what i'm catching before I even think of catching it lol. I don't know about every spider, but a lot about the ones prone to our area. It's easy to tell the difference from a hobo and a Brown recluse by the way they they place there legs when they sit still(wich they do a lot because they are reclusive.) Just so you guys know, if you see a spider in your house that's any shade of brown that runs a few feet, then stops, runs a few feet, then stops, stomp that shit. Hobo's and Brown Recluses can't really see while they are running, so they stop every few feet to gather where they are at and were they want to go. The only difference between a hobo bite and a brown recluse bit is that a brown recluse can kill you. It'd take quite a lot of hobo venom to kill someone. The bites are about the same.
I fed a wolf spider to my Hobo :) It was a good little scuffle before the Hobo started just lunging it's fangs into the wolf spiders face. Then it just collapsed. But notice that my spider only has 7 legs. Thanks to the wolf spider haha. It was quite a big spider as well.
I've only been nervouse of spiders twice in my life. Once was on a construction job in Washougal Wa. The house was absolutely infested with Hobo's. I mean every 8 inches on the foundation of the house was a nest. Every leafe on there squash plant had a nest in it(because the leaves had a funnel effect to them.) EVERYWHERE!!! The rock wall we had to stand on to build the deck had just as many. It must have been thousands of them. The other time was actually last night! I had to piss really bad, so I opened my back door to the garage(I didn't want to run all thee way through the house ya know.) So as I open the door I already had my zipper undone and everything and stuck it out the frame of the door. Luckily I looked down because I stuck my shit right through a big ol' spiders web and the F*CKER was hanging by one strand of web from my shit making his way torwards it. So I just attached the web to my finger, swung him to the ground and stomped his shit flat lol. Scared the living shit outta me! This shit is long and i'm done lol.

Dude...one spider I never knew existed until someone at work was F*CKING with me and told me about is the Brown Widow...it's a Brown Recluse and a Black Widow that mated...no shit...look it up. Apparently, it's F*CKIN deadly...a mixture of both venoms...freaked me the F*CK out when they told me about it....

Shit. Lol. F*CK spiders indeed!
My brother used to have a tarantula but that's about as friendly as I am with them!