interesting spider facts

March 9, 2010 | In: Animal facts for kids

Spiders have two body segments. The front segment is called the Cephalothorax. The second part of the body is called the Abdomen.

There are more than 30,000 species of spiders.

There can be up to nearly 5 million spiders per hectare.

A jumping spider can jump up to 25 times its own body length.

Black Widow ‘s bite is feared because its venom is reported to be 15 times stronger than a rattlesnake’s.

Male spiders are almost always smaller than the females and are often much more colorful.

Approximately 2000 people are bitten each year by Redback Spide.

The Dewdrop spider and other small spiders do not build a web but live near an orb web and eat the remains of left over insects.

The largest spider ever observed by scientists was over 8 feet long and weighed in at 530 pounds.

A spider egg contains as much DNA as four humans combined.

There are people in South America who eat tarantulas.

Some spiders, like Orb spiders, spin webs to catch flying insects. They make a new web every
day and eat the old one.

Not all spiders spin webs.

Fear of spiders is called Arachniphobia. It is one of the most common fears among humans.

Dragline spider silk has been estimated by scientists to be at least five times as strong as steel, twice as elastic as nylon, waterproof and stretchable.

Researchers around the world are interested in the remarkable properties of spider’s silk. In several molecular biology laboratories, efforts are currently being made to get bacteria to produce large amounts of spider silk, much like the way insulin is produced.

The silk owes its remarkable properties to hydrogen bonds, the same forces that keep DNA strands together.

The best-seeing spiders are the Salticids, or jumping spiders. They are the ones that seem to be looking back at you!

Jumping spiders have four large eyes in the front of their face, and four more on top. The eyes in front are highly developed, with special internal muscles that can move the retina. By moving the retina, the spider can change its direction of sight without moving its head, just as humans do when we move our eyes.

There are about 5,000 different kinds of jumping spiders. Most of them actively hunt their prey on foot, instead of sitting in a web and waiting. They are the spiders with the largest brains, relative to body size.

The bolas spider catches flying moths by swinging a long thread with a heavy, sticky ball on the end!

Moths are usually very difficult for spiders to catch, because their slippery scales come loose on the spider’s web, allowing them to escape. But the bolas spider uses two special tricks to catch moths.

First, the spider emits a substance that imitates the mating scent of a female moth, which causes male moths to fly close. Then it swings a long silk thread, or bolas, into the moth’s path. The bolas has a weight at the end made out of sticky glue. If the trap succeeds, the moth becomes entangled in loops of thread, and the spider has its next meal.