and I wish these bulletins were in color. One thing nashoba says in the description is it has 4 indistinct anterior white patches. I can't tell if the one above has those white patches or not. It appears it might, as long as they aren't flash or light reflections. Another thing the bulletin mentions is that cingulatus has brown distal ends of the first legs (missing on this spider) while nashoba legs are just described as green.

Thanks for all the help. Between this and my blog post, we seem to have it narrowed down to definitely Araneus something, with the nomination of A. cingulatus and the A.bonsallae suggested here.

I had scrutinized this and the other photos & originally thought is was a spider based on the body plan, but based on leg count had convinced myself it was an insect. And since it didn't look like anything I could find and most guides I found had adults, it must be an immature form!

Keith Robison (Arch G. the photographer is my dad)

so I don't know what else may be similar, but it looks good to me.

there are quite a few, and these can get confusing... which is why we have this holding bin. That being said, I am leaning toward A. cingulatus. The map combined with description in the bulletin "Small Orb-Weavers of the Genus Araneus North of Mexico" seem to lean in that direction.

Is that available online?

here. You may have to scroll down on the left to the title page between pages 472 and 473.

but it's available free here: www.americanarachnology.org.

at archive.org.

If you follow the link at the top of that page (which takes you here) and then follow the "All files:HTTP:" link from the "View the book" section of that page (which takes you here), you can find the original scans (from the entire 600+ page volume) in the filename that ends with "orig_jp2.tar", and the slightly cropped and reshaped versions of those same files in the file that ends with "jp2.zip".

The "scans" are actually high-quality photographs from what is by now a very overworked Canon 5D. The text is usually pretty readable for the online versions (the "Flippy Reader" and the pdf), but for the drawings and photos I highly recommend downloading the "jp2.zip" file.

An alternate path to the same resources would be through this link, where if you hover the mouse over the "Download/About this book" link you'll find a drop-down menu that lets you create a custom PDF containing up to 50 specific pages. You would need two PDFs to cover pages 473-552, but a downloaded PDF can often be more useful than being tied to web application.

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I guess I should have said yes :)!