But they're super cool.
Argiope aurantia, the "black and yellow garden spider", very common in the US.
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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Looks like a yellow orb weaver
Anything dangling head down in the center of a circular web is almost certainly some kind of Orb Weaver, at the very least.
Sometimes they’re called Writing Spiders because of the patterns they make in their webs.
This spider is the king of common names. From wikipedia:
Argiope aurantia is a species of spider, commonly known as the yellow garden spider, black and yellow garden spider, golden garden spider, writing spider, zigzag spider, zipper spider, black and yellow argiope, corn spider, Steeler spider, or McKinley spider.
But there is also other species in Argiope and they also use stabilimenta, so all the names referencing writing/zigzag/zipper, etc are ambiguous!
I can! That's a green one 😊
The iNaturalist app is pretty good to help identify critters and plants and bugs and stuff. It even identified some weird pink foam as snail eggs one time. Cool spider!