Wall spider
Oecobius navus
The wall spider is a tiny, flat spider with a round body and short legs. It spins a small flat web in the corners of walls and ceilings. It hunts in a very special way: it runs in circles around its prey.
Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
First from Europe and North Africa, now in houses all around the world
Length
2 to 2.5 mm (0.08 to 0.1 in)
What does it eat?
It catches tiny insects by running around them and wrapping them in ribbons of sticky silk.
How big is it?
How long is it?
🍚2.5 of them in a row are as long as one grain of rice🍽️could run across a dinner table in 6 seconds⚡moves 67 times its own body length every second
How big is Wall spider compared to YOU?
Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
How fast is it?
A garden snail about 0.05 km/h (0.03 mph)
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Wall spider about 0.6 km/h (0.37 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
Its little flat web is only about 3 centimetres wide.
2
Its body is only 2 to 2.5 millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
3
The mother spins several tiny egg sacs with 3 to 10 eggs in each, and then leaves them.
4
Two of its eight eyes are just flat silvery patches.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Oecobius navus
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Oecobiidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Oecobiidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, North America, South America
- Also known as
- Baseboard spider, Stucco spider
Where the facts come from
- Oecobius navus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Peter Webb. CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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