ELF ­ Designs in Nature ­ Spiders: FUN FACTS
after reviewing which center you’ll teach, print/highlight the fun facts that apply most closely with your center.
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❏ There are two main types of spiders: web builders and hunting/wandering
spiders.
❏ Most spiders only live for about a year, but female tarantulas may live for more
than twenty years.
❏ Many baby spiders, called spiderlings, spin threads of silk that are caught by the
wind and carry them to new places to live and grow. This is called “ballooning”.
❏ Spiderlings are the exact same organism as adults, only smaller, and grow by
shedding their exoskeleton.
❏ A spider’s skin is like a suit of armor. It’s made of a stiff material called “chitin”. It
doesn’t stretch so as a spider grows it sheds it’s skin and grows a new one.
❏ A spider has 8 eyes. The main eyes are the middle pair in the front row. They
focus and produce an image like a camera lens does. The smaller eyes are light
sensitive and pick up movement from a distance and help the spider to sense
danger.
❏ Even though they have 8 eyes, most spiders have poor eyesight. They rely on
their sense of touch. Sensitive hairs cover their body and legs and send
messages to the brain.
❏ A thread of spider silk is stronger than a thread of steel of the same thickness. It
has been suggested that a pencil thick strand of silk could stop a Boeing 747 in
flight.
❏ Spiders can make 7 different kinds of silk ­ some examples:
­sticky for making traps
­not sticky provide shelter
­making egg cases
­wrapping prey
­dragline that trails behind them to get home quick or drop out of sight
❏ A spider web can serve as camouflage and as a way for catching food, nursing
the egg sac, escape, etc.
❏ Some spiders can choose their color of silk they use to make webs. Golden Orb
Weaver can choose gold for sunny places and white for webs in shady places.
❏ Spiders know if prey is the right size to eat by how much the web shakes when it
lands.
❏ A type of water spider builds underwater homes/webs with their silk. They fill the
web with air bubbles from the surface. The air bubbles are called “diving bells”.
❏ Social spiders live in groups. thousands of these spiders can work together to
make a web as big as a garbage truck!
❏ Ray Spider makes an orb web that it uses like a slingshot to capture it’s prey.
❏ A common garden spider uses from 50­200 ft. of silk to build an orb shaped
web that is about one foot in diameter in about one hour.
❏ An orb­web spider spins about 100 webs during it’s lifetime.
❏ A spitting spider spits out sticky poisonous silk over an insect that wanders by.
Then the spider bites down.