The funnel weaver spiders I know and love: My entry to the first ever Geopolis photo contest

I'm expecting there to be many aesthetically pleasing pictures in the first @geopolis photo contest. I understand that spiders are not everyone's cup of tea, but I think my entry is pleasant looking, and I hope to sway your opinion, too.

This is an exterior wall opposite from where I work, and is literally feet from my face most of the day.

Webs lacing the brickwork concealing terrifying (looking), but harmless funnel weaver spiders are a very common sight where I live. These are not to be confused with the dangerously poisonous funnel web spiders from Australia.

I'm not exagerrating when I say 'lacing', this image came out more blurry than I wanted, but this is characteristic of the web density in areas where the spiders like to live:

You may have noticed that there's dark spots near the center, that's because the spiders are apparently boring holes through the mortar:

Is this badass, scary, amazing, or all of the above?

Sadly, it's cold outside, so I couldn't coax any to come out and play, but wikipedia comes to the rescue, I can show you what they look like thanks to DenSchub courteously putting an image under CC4.

Pretty scary, huh? Did I mention that they can easily be larger than the size of a US quarter, and my wife swears she can hear when they walk on solid surfaces.

You may have also noticed the lighter brown markings on their cephalothorax - unfortunately, this makes many (understandably) panicked people think of the 'brown violin' which marks a brown recluse. I say unfortunately, because these arachnids are completely^† harmless. They rarely bite, and if they do the bite is (reportedly) painless. I see them almost every day in my lab, and all they want to do when I inadvertently uncover them from their hiding place is to run away and be left alone.

Oh hi, don't mind me arachno-labmate. (Sadly, this one is dead.)

I like having these guys around, they are harmless, make really neat webs, and keep the area free of more annoying vermin. (I couldn't get a good photo, but they seem to be keeping silverfish, in particular, under control.) Plus, looking for them even helped me notice this little marker of love someone put up recently.

Awww.

While their main ecological roles are eatin' bugs and freaking out uninformed humans, there is a neat tidbit I was unaware of until I did some background reading for this post. Unfortunately, wikipedia doesn't list the sources (whatever happened to citation needed every other sentence?), but it appears there was a longstanding hypothesis that these spiders invaded the US on logging ships during the Napoleonic era. Like many longstanding ecological hypotheses, this has been turned on its head in the face of new genetic data (likely from this study). Also, unrelated to this genera, but holy crap, some spiders have doubled their whole genome!

All images my own and released under CC0 unless otherwise stated.