This morning when I was talking on the phone with my sister outside, I noticed a spider wrapping up a fly it had caught in its web. I recognized it immediately as a cellar spider, Family Pholcidae, because of its slender body, long legs and the tangled shape of its web. It also has dark markings on the underside of its body.

The larger cellar spiders common around homes in the Southwest have been introduced from Europe. This one looks like the marbled cellar spider, Holocnemus pluchei, because of the marbled white and pinkish-red pattern on its abdomen.

 

We have a community of cellar spiders that live on the outside of one of the windows where we watch our bird feeder. When the feeder is quiet, we watch the spiders instead.

Have you ever watched a spider?