Pantropical huntsman spider
The pantropical huntsman spider is a big, flat, brown spider with long legs. It lives in warm places all around the world and often moves into houses. It does not spin a web. It runs after insects and catches them.
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Fun facts
With its legs spread out, it is 7 to 10 centimetres across, about as big as your hand.
To impress a female, the male shakes his body and makes a quiet buzzing hum that people can just hear.
A mother carries her round egg sac under her body. It can hold more than 400 eggs.
In some warm countries people are happy to have it at home, because it eats pest insects.
It does not like cold, so in cooler places it can only live indoors.
Most asked questions about Pantropical huntsman spider
?How big is a huntsman spider?
Its body is 2.2 to 2.8 centimetres long, and with its legs it can be 10 centimetres across.
?Why is a huntsman spider in my house?
It likes warm, sheltered places and hunts the insects that live there.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Heteropoda venatoria
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Sparassidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Sparassidae
- Lives on
- Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Giant crab spider, Cane spider, African huntsman spider, Giant mombasa spider
Where the facts come from
- Heteropoda venatoria (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 Jeevan Jose, Kerala, India. CC BY-SA 4.0, 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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