Found a few of these in our hedges. Thought it was a wasp, until it moved and showed its legs and got a bit protective of its home!!

Anyone know of its name or if it is harmful???

Wasp spider perhaps?

What a combo! My two worst insects in a two-for-one deal - uugghh

I shouldn't worry too much...

We had one that (if memory serves) looked like this female which was spanning an alcove next to the board-walk walk way to an apartment I lived at in Florida.
It was missing a leg or two, my friend and I affectionately referred to it as our "disabled war hero" after we'd speculated a bit on the scenario in which it received it's injuries.


Alas, we invited some other friends over for dinner and much alcohol was consumed. One of our guests did not have the same reverence for our hero spider which kept the thumb-sized cockroaches at bay and snatched it out of it's web and ate it.
The young man in question was never invited for dinner again... I'd have thought my delicious spiced apricot glazed ham would have been quite satisfying enough without the spider snack.

Amazing spider. I captured this picture of one at my home in Spain last year. It was quite big and there was a 4 day stand off between the 10 cm praying mantis and this arachnid. I don't know who ate who in the end because it was toward the end of our visit so we had to leave them to it.

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Any chance of an invitation to one of your dinner parties...? It sounds like you associate with my kind of people!

There must be a website or an animal group you can send it to for verification that it is not dangerous. One of the zoos would be a good bet to. I think they take pictures.

I had a friend who stuck one in his beer and drank it

Let's see... my friend was my best friend and room mate who is another military brat, a Korean-American who holds a degree in accounting and is in banking.

The group who came over for dinner was a Mexican guy I was seeing at the time who'd snuck into the US via railway by hiding inside a Cadillac. He'd worked in some fancy French restaurant in Chicago for a while before winding up in construction.

The others who came (including my snacker) were his friends:
A grey-haired, wildly bearded biker named Kimmy who rented the apartment above him.
A guy from Boston of Puerto Rican descent who carried himself (and was built a bit) like the ground hog in the movie Caddy Shack.
The Bostonian's incredibly coarse stripper girlfriend.
The snacker who referred to his family as "Kaintuck"... aka Kentucky rednecks.

We met them in a reggae bar one night...

T'was a fun group to hang with.



Edit:
Anyhow... as I seem to be skewing the topic a bit, I'll come back to it by saying this:

I had no idea there were spiders that large here!
I'm alright with spiders, as long as they are over ~~~~~~~> there.
Not so keen if I feel one crawling on my arm.