Bug card No. 1975 of 4,939

Graceful-legs lynx

Oxyopes gracilipes

Eats: Other bugs and small animals SpidersGardens and meadows8 legsNot an insect, but a bug cousin

The graceful-legs lynx is a lynx spider from New Zealand and Australia. Lynx spiders do not wait in a web. They go out and hunt their food on plants.

Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!

Lives in

New Zealand and Australia

Top speed

about 1.2 km/h (0.75 mph)

On foot, estimate

Can it hurt you?

Harmless

What does it eat?

It hunts small insects instead of catching them in a web.

A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)

Graceful-legs lynx 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

Scientists first described it in 1849 under the name Sphasus gracilipes.

Later, other scientists described it again as if it were a new spider and gave it new names, Oxyopes elegans and Sphasus gregarius.

In 1998 it was finally moved into the group Oxyopes, and the extra names were found to belong to the same spider.

you asked

?Where does the graceful-legs lynx live?

In New Zealand and Australia.

Oxyopes gracilipes (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 Didier Descouens. CC BY-SA 4.0, 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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