![]() ![]() Sometimes the male is very much smaller than the female. The whole business takes 10-15 minutes in small spiders and several hours for a large tarantula. Once free of it the spider flexes its legs otherwise the joints would seize up. ![]() When it is time to change its shell, the exoskeleton cracks and the front of the spider emerges. Their bodies are soft inside the armour plating. Spiders moult these shells as they grow inside them. Spiders have a hard outer shell made of a substance called chitin. At the very end of the abdomen are the spinnerets that spin the silk to make webs. The rear part of their body is called the abdomen. The palps handle the prey and are used by the male during mating. They also have two palps next to the mouth. Their fangs are for injecting poison into the prey. Spiders have very different bodies to us humans. For example, the raft spider lives on the surface of the water and moves around by rowing with its legs. The Bolas spider spins a thread with a sticky drop at the end which it swings around trying to catch moths that fly by.The big spiders you see in the bath are funnel webs. Funnel web spiders have a flat web with a tunnel at one side where the spider lurks.Then the spider will wrap it up with silk to make a parcel. As the prey struggles in the web the spider will rush out from its hiding place and bite the insect with a paralysing poison so that it cannot move. They sit at the edge or in the centre of the webs waiting for prey to stumble into the sticky threads. The spider that you see in the garden with a white cross on its back builds an orb web.Although North American tarantulas are very poisonous, European tarantulas are less poisonous than is usually believed. Tarantulas live in silk burrows in the soil. People who were bitten by a tarantula were supposed to do a wild dance called a tarantella because of the pain of the bite. They get their name from the town of Taranto in Italy. Wolf spiders lie in wait, hoping for an insect to pass by.We now call spiders Arachnids after Arachne. She turned poor Arachne into a spider to weave webs for ever more. The Goddess Athena saw her work and was jealous. She was a wonderful weaver of cloth and spinner of thread. In the stories the ancient Greeks told there was a girl called Arachne. Are you an arachnophobe or an arachnophile? ![]()
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