101
Facts
about Spiders
Spiders are vital to a healthy ecosystem. They eat
harmful insects, pollinate plants, and recycle dead animal and plants back into
the earth. They are also a valuable food source for many small mammals, birds,
and Fish. However, spiders are
considered as fearful and nuisance by human beings. March 14 is commemorated as "Save a spider
day" and it is for the conservation of spiders. The message is to
encourage people not to kill a spider they find in their home but rather move
it outside.
Given below are some spider facts. Just go
through them. You will get a comprehensive knowledge about spiders.
- A spider’s body has a special oily substance that keeps it from getting
stuck in its web.
- A female black widow needs to mate only once.
After she has mated, she can produce eggs for the rest of her life.
- A red widow female spider
will begin feeding on the male while they are still mating. However, the male
practically force feeds himself to the female by placing himself into her
mandibles. If she “spits him out,” he will repeatedly place himself there until she eats him.
- A spider has no bones.
- A spider’s muscles pull its legs inward, but cannot extend its legs out
again
- A tarantula can liquefy the body of a mouse in
just 2 days, leaving behind a pile of just skin and bones.
- A web is sticky because of glue droplets the
spider deposits on it.
- Abandoned spider webs are
called “cobwebs”
- According to Greek myth, a
girl named Arachne could spin so well that the goddess Athena became jealous
and turned her into a spider.
- All spiders spin silk, but
not all spiders spin webs.
- An abnormal fear of spiders
is called ‘arachnophobia
- An estimated one million
spiders live in one acre of land. The number might be closer to three million
in the tropics.
- Arachnophobia is is one of
the most common phobias in North America and Europe. Arachnophobia is less
common in tropical places where there are larger, hairy spiders.
- Black widow bites can also
cause other nerve-related problems, such as high blood pressure, restlessness,
and severe facial spasms.
- British singer Katie Melua went to a doctor after she heard a “shuffling” in her ear. The doctor
discovered that a jumping spider was living in her.
- Different drugs affect the way spiders spin their webs. For
example, spiders on LSD spin beautiful webs, while spiders on caffeine spin
terrible webs. Scientists believe that examining the shape of a spider’s web can also help detect airborne chemicals and pollutants.
- Giant Huntsman spiders have
leg-spans of around 30cm.
- Giant trapdoor spiders are considered living fossils
- Hummingbirds use small sticks and the silk from spider webs to
weave a nest for themselves.
- Hundreds of years ago,
people put spider webs on their wounds because they believed it would help stop
the bleeding. Scientists now know that the silk contains vitamin K, which helps
reduce bleeding.
- In early comic books, the
radioactive spider that bites Peter Parker is incorrectly referred to as an
insect.
- In rare instances, some
spider bites can cause blood disorders.
- In spiders, oxygen is bound to hemocyanin, a molecule that
contains copper rather than iron. That is the reason for their blue blood.
- In tropical regions,
net-throwing spiders make a small silken web that they throw over their prey.
- It is a myth that a human will swallow an average of four of
spiders while sleeping during his or her life. It is highly unlikely a spider
will ever end up in a sleeping human’s mouth.
- It is estimated that a
human is never more than 10 feet away from a spider
- Jumping spiders can leap up to 40 times their own body length. If
humans could jump this far, they would be able to jump over 230 feet.
- Jumping spiders don’t have strong muscle legs. They jump by contracting muscles in
their abdomen, which forces liquid into their back legs.
- Like rock climbers, many spiders are attached to a line of silk in
case they fall. They can also run up it, if they need to escape.
- Male spiders weave a small “sperm” web. They then place a
drop of semen on the web, suck it up with their pedipalps, and then use the
pedipalp to insert the sperm into the female.
- Most female spiders are bigger than male spiders.
- Most spiders are harmless
to humans but a few spider species bite
humans and inject venom
- Most spiders found in homes have adapted to life indoors. They
have little chance of surviving outdoors.
- Most spiders have eight
eyes and are very near sighted.
- Spiders have tiny hairs on their legs to help them hear and smell.
- Most spiders live alone, meeting other spiders
only to mate.
- A few species of spiders
are social and live in groups. Most tarantula species pose no threat to humans
- Most spiders live for about
a year. However, some tarantulas live more than 20 years.
- Most spiders make silk
which they use to create spider webs and capture prey.
- Most spiders’ fangs are like pincers that move sideways toward each other to bite.
- Bbird-eating spiders, have long fangs that point straight down.
- Mother spiders can lay as
many as 3,000 eggs at one time.
- Baby spiders are called spider lings.
- Most mother spiders do not stay with their babies, the wolf
spiders carry their babies on their backs.
- Only female black widows
build webs and catch prey. Males do not feed as adults; instead, they
concentrate all their effort on mating.
- A female black widow may sometimes eat a male after mating.
- Only the bite of the female
black widow is dangerous; the male is much smaller than the female, and males
and juveniles are harmless to humans.
- Other members of the
arachnid family include scorpions, mites, and ticks
- Probably the most charming
spider in history is Charlotte in E.B. White’s beloved novel Charlotte’s Web. She lives in a barn and saves the life of her good friend,
Wilbur the pig.
- Scientists in the United
States Defense Department are trying to copy gold orb weaver silk in order to
use it for bulletproof vests.
- Some male spiders give dead
flies to the females as presents.
- Some species of jumping
spiders can see light spectrums that humans cannot. Some can see both UVA and
UVB light.
- Some spiders don’t use webs to catch their prey. Instead, they make a sticky gum,
which they fire out through their fangs.
- Some spiders eat their webs and then reuse them.
- Some spiders, such as house spiders, are able to run up walls
because their feet are covered in tiny hairs that grip the surface.
- Some tarantulas will fling tiny, irritating hairs, known as
urticating hairs, to thwart predators.
- Spider webs are not passive traps. Instead, because of
electrically conducive glue spread across their surface, webs spring towards
their prey.
- Scientists also found that the glue spirals on the web distort
Earth ’s electric field within a
few millimeters of the web.
- Spider-Man is one of the
most popular superheroes.
- Spiders are arachnids, not
insects.
- Spiders are blamed for all kinds of bumps, rashes, and growths.
However, unlike mosquitoes or ticks, spiders don’t feed on human blood and they have no reason to bite a human
unless they feel threatened .
- Spiders are found on every continent except Antarctica.
- Spiders are the only group of animals to build webs.
- Spiders can’t fly, but they sometimes
sail through the air on a line of silk, which is known as “ballooning.”
- Spiders do not have teeth,
so they cannot chew their food. Instead, they inject digestive juices into the innards
of their meal. Then the spider sucks up it innards.
- Spiders eat more insects than birds and bats combined.
- Spiders have 8 legs while
insects have 6.*.Spiders don’t have antennae while
insects do.
- Spiders have between two and six spinnerets at the back of their
abdomen. Each one is like a tiny showerhead that has hundreds of holes, all
producing liquid silk.
- Spiders have blue blood
- Spiders have inspired scientists to make space
robots. For example, the “Spidernaut” is a mechanical spider that is designed to crawl over the outside
of a spacecraft to carry out repairs.
- The Bagheera kiplingi is the world’s only vegetarian spider
- The bird-dropping spider
gets its name because it looks like bird poo. This type of camouflage prevents
birds from eating it.
- The bite of the brown recluse spider, which is found in the
southeastern United States, is particularly dangerous because its bite is
initially painless. A person may be bitten without realizing it, but after
awhile the skin starts to swell and become incredibly painful. A bite could
kill a person if not treated.
- The black widow and the brown recluse are the only two spiders in
North America whose bite can be serious.
- The bolas spider catches moths using a thick silk thread with a
large sticky droplet at the end. The droplet has the same smell as a female
moth, which tempts other moths to the trap.
- The Darwin bark spider creates the strongest material made by a
living organism.
- The effects of a spider bite vary according to several factors,
including the amount of venom injected and the size and age of the person who
was bitten.
- The female tarantula hawk wasp feeds her babies tarantulas. She
attacks, stings, and paralyzes the huge spider. Afterward, she drags the spider
into her lair and lays an egg on it—while the spider is still alive.
- The funnel web spider is an
aggressive spider that attacks and bites people. Its poison has been known to
kill in just 15 minutes.
- The largest specie of
tarantula is the Goliath Bird eater
- The most deadly spiders in the world include the black widow,
funnel web, and brown recluse spiders. One of the most feared spiders in the
world is tarantula but it has less venom.
- The silk in a spider’s web is five times stronger than a strand of steel that is the
same thickness.
- A web made of strands of
spider silk as thick as a pencil could stop a Boeing 747 jumbo jet in flight.
- Scientists still cannot replicate the strength and elasticity of a
spider’s silk.
- The silk that comes out of the spider’s spinneret is liquid, but it hardens as soon as it comes in
contact with air. Some spiders have up to seven types of silk glands, each
creating a different type of silk—such as smooth, sticky, dry, or stretchy.
- The venom of the black widow spider attacks nerves by blocking
their signals to the muscles.
- The venom of the female black widow is 15 times more powerful than
the poison of a rattlesnake.
- The word “spider” comes from the Old English word spithra and is related to the
German spinne, both of which mean “spinner.” The word “spinster” is also related and means “one who spins thread.
- While humans have muscles on the outside of their skeleton,
spiders have muscles on the inside. A spider’s skeleton, or exoskeleton, covers and protects its muscles.
- The world’s biggest spider is the
goliath spider .It can grow up to 11 inches wide, and its fangs are up to one
inch long. It hunts frogs, lizards, mice, etc.
- The world’s smallest spider is the
Patu marplesi .
- There are approximately 38,000 known species of spiders
- Two kinds of jumping spiders have been found at 23,000 feet. At
this height, no plants grow, but plant material blows up from lower elevations,
which is enough to feed the tiny creatures.
- Unlike insects, spiders do
not have antennas.
- Water spider spiders
spend their entire lives in water. These spiders construct a “diving bell” that allows them to live
and spin webs underwater.
- Water spiders use their
legs like a fishing pole to pull in insects, tadpoles, and even small fish.
- Web-weaving spiders have two or three claws at the tip of each leg
that they use to swing from strand to strand without getting stuck in the
sticky part of their web.
- When a spider travels, it
always has four legs touching the ground and four legs off the ground at any given
moment.
- When a wheel spider gets scared, it tucks in its legs and rolls
across the sand.
- While most spiders build a new web every day,
the web of the gold orb can last several years and can even catch birds.
- Wolf spiders can run at speeds of up to 2 feet
per second.
Comments