Orchard Orb-weaver
Leucauge venusta · Spiders
Orchard Orb-weaver
Arverne Preserve, 20 June 2026
An Orchard Orb-weaver hanging upside down at the hub of its web in the marsh-edge scrub at Arverne. It is a spider of dappled shade and woodland edge across the eastern United States, and it is as happy in a coastal thicket as in the orchards it is named for.
One of the few genuinely colourful spiders in the Northeast - metallic green and silver above, with a wash of yellow and sometimes red underneath, though little of that shows from this angle. It builds its orb web on a tilted rather than vertical plane and habitually hangs beneath it, which is the pose here.
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