Top Spider Flashcards

Spiders are small creatures with eight legs, many eyes, and a hard exoskeleton. Although many people think of them as insects, they actually belong to a totally separate group of animals called the Arachnids — a group that also includes mites, ticks, and scorpions. The easiest way to tell the difference is that insects always have six legs, while spiders and other arachnids have eight.

Spiders are an incredibly diverse order with over 45,000 different species. They have been incredibly successful on our planet, colonizing a huge variety of different habitats all over the globe. They’ve developed a bewildering assortment of adaptations, including a unique sticky silk that some spiders weave into a web to catch prey.

All spiders are carnivores, so they get their nutrients from eating other animals — usually insects, though a few are big enough to eat small rodents and reptiles! All spiders have long, deadly fangs and nearly all of them are venomous. Only a few, though, can produce venom toxic enough to injure a human, so most spiders are harmless.