About this photo:

This spider constructed a web nightly across the sliding glass door leading onto our back deck.

This shows how hard it is to identify spiders from a photograph. After taking this photograph, we had a long, sometimes argumentative conference on whether this was arabesca, or domiciliorum. Jim argued that the shape of the abdomen and the pattern on the back made it likely to be domiciliorum. Linda and niece Panika both argued that the picture looked just like the drawing of arabesca on page 149 of How to Know the Spiders. From the range, arabesca is more likely. Jim wanted a new species.

However, another view of this same spider shows the distinctive field marks to identify it.