Painted cross spider
The painted cross spider is an orb weaver, a spider that spins a big round web. The female has a patterned body and is much bigger than the male. It lives in warm, tropical places in Australia and nearby islands.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
The female adds special silk decorations to her web.
In Australia, the decorations usually make a straight line above and below the middle of the web.
In Papua New Guinea, the same kind of spider makes a big X shape instead, and nobody knows why yet.
The males look almost exactly like the males of a cousin spider, so they are very hard to tell apart.
Scientists still know very little about how it lives.
Most asked questions about Painted cross spider
?Where does the painted cross spider live?
In tropical Queensland in Australia, in Papua New Guinea and on the Moluccas.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Argiope picta
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Araneidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Araneidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania, Asia
Where the facts come from
- Argiope picta (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 Summerdrought. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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