If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Spiders are unwelcome in many homes, and although they have a scary reputation they are actually one of the most useful and friendly critters on the planet.  Just because you’d prefer to keep them out of your house doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate them.  Here are 20 fascinating facts about spiders that you may not know:

1. Spiders are not insects.  They are arachnids.  Insects have three body sections and six legs; spiders have two body sections and eight legs.
2.  There are more than 30,000 known species of spiders.
3. Despite the fact that most spiders have 6-8 pairs of eyes, their eyesight is very poor.  They use the fine hairs on their bodies to sense movement and signal when they should run or attack.
4. The male spider is usually smaller than the female.
5. The word “spider” comes from the Old English word “spinnan” which means “to spin.”
6. Spiders digest their food before they eat it!  They inject digestive enzymes into their prey which turns the captured critter into liquid and allows the spider to suck up the mush through a special “straw.”
7. Despite its scary appearance, the tarantula is no more poisonous than a bee sting.
8. The spider’s web is made out of protein.  When it’s time to spin a new web, the spider will eat the old web.
9. The golden spider spins silk that is as strong as a steel wire of the same size.
10. Little Miss Muffet from the Mother Goose nursery rhyme was a real person.  She was the daughter of Dr. Mouffet who believed you could be healed by eating spiders.
11. Each year, spiders eat so many insects that the combined weight of their pray exceeds the weight of the entire global population of humans.
12. The largest known spider is the Goliath tarantula which makes its home in South America.  Its body can span a dinner plate.
13. Most spiders live for less than six months, but the female tarantula can live up to 25 years!
14. A spider’s silk is liquid until it hits the air and then it coagulates into thread.
15. The black widow’s venom is 15x more powerful than the venom of the diamondback rattlesnake.  However, because only a tiny amount is injected when she bites, very few people die from the black widow spider’s bite.

For a free Los Angles pest control inspection, give us a call at 888-675-0258 or go to www.accuracypluscalifornia.com.

Tags: Spiders

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 11:28 am and is filed under Spiders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.