Wandering house cobweaver
Parasteatoda tabulata
The wandering house cobweaver is a small cobweb spider. It builds a messy tangle of threads to catch its food. It first came from warm parts of Asia but has travelled around the world.
Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
First from tropical Asia, now also in North America, Europe, China, Korea and Japan
What does it eat?
It catches small insects that get stuck in its tangled web.
How fast is it?
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Wandering house cobweaver about 1.2 km/h (0.75 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
A kid running fast about 13 km/h (8.1 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
It came from tropical Asia but has now spread to North America and Europe.
2
Its web is not a neat wheel. It is a tangle of threads going every which way.
3
It was first described in 1980, from a female spider.
you asked
Most asked questions about Wandering house cobweaver
?Where does the wandering house cobweaver come from?
From tropical Asia, but it now lives in many other parts of the world.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Parasteatoda tabulata
- Named by
- Levi, 1980
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Theridiidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Theridiidae
- Lives on
- Asia, North America, Europe
Where the facts come from
- Parasteatoda tabulata (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 Gergin Blagoev. CC BY-SA 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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