101 Facts about Spiders

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.