European garden spider
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Order: Araneae
Suborder: Araneomorphae
Family: Araneidae

[Photo] European Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus). Picture taken by Tim Bekaert (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tbc) in Heule (Belgium) on September, 26 2004.

Copyright (C) 2004 Tim Bekaert Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

The European garden spider (Araneus diadematus, cross spider) is a very common and well-known orb-weaver spider in Western Europe. Araneus diadematus also lives in parts of North America, in a range extending from New England and the Southeast to the Northwestern United States and adjacent parts of Canada.

Individual spiders' colouring can range from extremely light yellow to very dark gray, but all European garden spiders have mottled markings across the back with five or more large white dots forming a cross. The white dots result from cells that are filled with guanine, which is a byproduct of protein metabolism.

Garden spiders have been known to stridulate when threatened.

It is hard to provoke a garden spider to bite - if it does, the bite is slightly unpleasant, though utterly harmless to humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_garden_spider

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