Hawaiian garden spider
Argiope appensa
The Hawaiian garden spider is a big orb-weaving spider. The female is striking black and yellow, while the male is small and brown. It builds a large round web with a white zig-zag ribbon of silk in it.
Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
Hawaii and western Pacific islands, from Taiwan and Indonesia to New Guinea and Australia
What does it eat?
It catches flying insects in its large web.
How fast is it?
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Hawaiian garden 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
With her legs stretched out, a female can be about 6 centimetres across. The male is only about 2 centimetres.
2
The white zig-zag in its web may warn birds so they do not fly through it by mistake.
3
Tiny thief spiders sneak into its web to steal leftover food.
4
On Guam, snakes ate so many birds that these spiders became very common there.
you asked
Most asked questions about Hawaiian garden spider
?Why does the Hawaiian garden spider make a zig-zag in its web?
Scientists think the white zig-zag may warn birds so they do not crash through the web.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Argiope appensa
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Araneidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Araneidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania, Asia
- Also known as
- Banana spider
Where the facts come from
- Argiope appensa (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 No machine-readable author provided. BetacommandBot assumed (based on copyright claims).. CC BY 2.5, 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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