Bird-dropping spider
The bird-dropping spider has a very clever disguise: it looks just like a blob of bird poo. Birds do not want to eat that, so they leave it alone. It sits perfectly still all day and comes alive at night.
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Fun facts
The female is about 12 millimetres long, but the male is tiny, only about 2.5 millimetres.
At night it hangs from a single silk thread and catches moths with its strong front legs.
Its egg sacs are brown marbled balls, each holding more than 200 eggs.
It can join up to 13 egg sacs together with silk and wait for food underneath them.
Most asked questions about Bird-dropping spider
?Why does the bird-dropping spider look like poo?
So that birds, its main enemies, think it is just a dropping and leave it alone.
?What does the bird-dropping spider eat?
Almost only male moths, which it lures with a smell like a female moth.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Celaenia excavata
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Araneidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Araneidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania
Where the facts come from
- Celaenia excavata (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 unknown author. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same 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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