Need Help with IDing a Spider

BennySmithy · #1 (**permalink**) 08-04-2011, 04:49 PM

Hi, this is my first post so please ignore any faults with it.

I found a spider crawling around on my bathroom light today. My house is full of spiders and they scare me (I'm paranoid they're all poisonous and that they'll bite me and I'll get ill =/ ), but I find them really interesting and I like them (which is why I want help IDing it coz I wanna know if I need to get rid of it).

Anyhoo, it's is small black, shiny spider, it's body was maybe 2cm long, with a large abdomen. It had what looked like small, faint white markings on its abdomen. it's legs were about the length of it's body.

Whilst I was in the room a fly (rather foolishly) landed on a tangle of webs hanging from the light. The web looked like, without a better word, a dreadlock. The spider then scurried to the web and pulled it up and ate the fly, leaving the web in a ball.

I googled what the spider looked like, what the web looked like, and couldn't find anything but pages about Black Widowsbut it didn't have a red hourglass shape (that I could see). So after an hour and a bit (closer to two and a half after registering making this thread) I decided to make a thread here as I saw some very well answered questions about spiders.

Sadly, by the time I found a camera (my phone's battery is dead, must charge it after I finish this) to take a picture, the spider has gotten to a part of the light fitting that I cant get an angle to take a picture of it, I will try when it moves again.

I'm just getting paranoid after reading 50+ pages of black widows and venomous bites and could do with some clarification that it's not gunna kill me hehe. But I think it came in from outside, and it's been really cold in Norfolk recently...

Anyway sorry for the long post, I don't know if it's frowned upon but I tried to include as many details as I could.

Thanks for reading and for any help that you can give

Ben