Brown spitting spider
Scytodes fusca
The brown spitting spider has a very special trick. Instead of building a web to catch its food, it spits sticky threads over its prey from a distance. It often lives in houses and comes out at night.
Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
First from Central and South America, now in houses in many warm parts of the world
What does it eat?
It catches insects and other small animals by spitting sticky threads at them.
How fast is it?
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Brown spitting spider 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 is a night-time spider that walks around to hunt instead of waiting in a web.
2
People have carried it by accident to Europe, Africa, India, China, Japan and Hawaii.
3
In South Africa it lives from near the sea up to more than 1,600 metres high.
you asked
Most asked questions about Brown spitting spider
?Why is it called a spitting spider?
Because it catches food by spitting sticky threads over it.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Scytodes fusca
- Named by
- Walckenaer, 1837
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Scytodidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Scytodidae
- Lives on
- South America, North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Dark common spitting spider
Where the facts come from
- Scytodes fusca (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 Hector Gabriel. CC0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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