Spiders are an air-breathing group of animals called “arachnids” that have eight legs and jaws with fangs that are able to inject venom.

Arachnids are creatures with two body segments, eight legs, no wings or antennae and are not able to chew. Spiders have no extensor muscles in their limbs and instead extend their limbs by hydraulic pressure.

Spiders are not insects. Spiders, while sharing certain features with insects, differ because arachnids sport only two body segments while insects have a head, thorax and an abdomen, besides only 6 legs compared with the eight legs of spiders.

While the venom of a few species is dangerous to humans, scientists are now researching the use of spider venom in medicine and as non-polluting pesticides. All spiders are predators and many will eat other spiders.

Most spiders that people encounter in daily life have jaws with fangs that point diagonally forward and cross in a pinching action. Other kind’s arachnids have jaws with fangs which point straight down and do not cross each other.

Spiders are often classified by the number of eyes and eye arrangement. The eye arrangement gives clues to the spiders’ hunting styles. Spiders have eight eyes or less. In general, web building spiders have bad eyesight, while hunting spiders have good eyesight which see their prey during moonless nights. Some spiders have up to four rows of eyes and there are 25 different arrangements of spider’s eyes.

How do you tell the sex of a spider? You look at the palps, the appendages near the mouthparts. The male has large palps with bulbous ends which look like boxing gloves. He uses these to deposit sperm into the female. In comparison the female has long thin palps.

Spider webs are made of spider silk

Spiders’ silk is a material made from proteins and spun through special organs inside their bodies, to create their webs, which help them travel around. Some use the silk as an anchor for jumping, and others use it to float along in the wind.

A spider has numerous silk glands that can produce different types of silk for different uses and can have different properties. For example some spider silk is sticky and some is not. Here is a short list of spider silk uses: to capture prey, to immobilize prey, for reproduction, for travel, for nest construction, as guidelines of webs, as anchor lines of webs, as alarm lines of webs, and to attract the opposite sex to find a mate.

Spider silk is famous for its strength and durability and some types of silk can stretch up to five times their original length. The silk is liquid but solidifies into an extremely resilient strand when it contacts air. It is not squirted out, but pulled out, by a spider’s leg or anchored to a twig.

A spider either ambushes, actively hunts or uses a web to catch its prey. An interesting fact about spiders is there is no consistent relationship between the classification of spiders and the types of web they build. Some species of spiders in the same genus may build very similar or significantly different webs.

All spiders make silk but only about half of the known spider species catch prey by means of webs. The Ogre-Faced, Bolas, Saltids, Lynx and other spider families are just some types of spiders that do not build webs.

THERE ARE FOUR MAIN SPIDER WEB SHAPES: COBWEB, FUNNEL WEB, ORB WEB AND SHEET WEB.

BELOW ARE SOME OF THE SPIDERS THAT CAN BE SEEN IN OR AROUND THE LORRAINE CHERRY NATURE PRESERVE DURING THE YEAR.