25 Spider Facts For Kids

1. Spider is a common name for a large group of eight legged arthropods that are members of the Araneae order.
2. Spiders are not insects, they are Arachnid, but commonly and incorrectly called insects.
3. Spiders are well-known for the web building skills, agile movements, and ability to scare the crap out of people.
4. Spiders are poor candidates for fossilization, the earliest fossilized evidence of spiders is 100 million years old.
5. Spiders are found virtually worldwide, apart from Antarctica and there is little to no landmass they haven’t inhabited.
6. There have been over 50,000 species of spiders identified and described by scientists.
7. Spiders come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors.
8. A typical spider has a head, eyes, fangs, eight legs, thorax, and spinnerets.
9. Spiders are carnivorous and will eat virtually any insect and if a large enough spider species, small mammals, and birds.
10. Spiders capture their prey using webs, ambush techniques and traditional hunting.
11. A spider that uses a web to catch its prey simply waits for something to get stuck in it and then strikes.
12. A spider that uses ambush techniques to catch its prey will wait for something to get close to it and then strike.
13. A spider that uses traditional hunting to catch its prey will actively search out and strike at prey when it sees it.
14. Spiders inject their prey with venom and use enzymes to break it down and drink it up.
15. A spider’s venom can be deadly to humans, with some spider species being especially dangerous. However, death from a spider bite is very rare. In the United States, only seven people a year die on average from a spider bite.
16. Some spiders are very easy to identify, like the black widow spider with its solid black body and red shaped hourglass on its belly.
17. Spider silk, the material used to build spider webs, is believed to be five times stronger than steel.
18. The average spider species only lives about two years, but some spiders in captivity have lived for up to 20 years.
19. Female spiders are bigger than male spiders and its typical for a male spider to get eating trying to and after mating.
20. One of the smallest spiders in the world is a male Patu digua with a body length of only 0.015 inches.
21. One of the largest spiders in the world is the Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi) with a body length of 5.1 inches.
22. One of the fastest spiders in the world is the Moroccan flic-flac spider (Cebrennus rechenbergi) with a running speed of 3.8 miles per hour.
23. One of the farther jumping spiders in the world is the giant jumping spider (Hyllus giganteus).
24. One of the deadliest spiders in the world is the Sydney funnel-web spider (Atrax robustus) with its potent venom.
25. A person who has an intense or irrational fear of spiders suffers from arachnophobia.

Spider Pictures

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the below images will be helpful for your research on spiders. Below are six various pictures of spiders. These pictures should help you better understand spiders, one of the creepiest creatures in the world.

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