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Sticker of Garden cross spider
Bug card No. 1793 of 4,939

Garden cross spider

Argiope pulchella
Eats: Other bugs and small animalsSpidersGardens and meadows8 legsNot an insect, but a bug cousin

The female garden cross spider is bright yellow with three black stripes across her back, and her legs are banded brown and yellow. She sits head down in the middle of a round web. The male is small and brown.

Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
From India to China, Indochina and Sumatra, in gardens, woods and near houses
Length
0.4 to 1 cm (0.16 to 0.39 in)
females are bigger than males
Top speed
about 1.2 km/h (0.75 mph)
On foot, estimate
What does it eat?
It catches many kinds of insects in its web.
For real!Photo of Garden cross spider
Picture by Jeevan Jose, Kerala, India. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Garden cross spider about 1 cm long (0.39 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)
small enough to sit on your fingernailas long as 1.5 grains of rice in a rowcould run across a dinner table in 3 secondsmoves 33 times its own body length every second

How big is Garden cross spider compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

Its web has a bright zig-zag band of silk in the middle.

2

If something disturbs it, it drops to the ground and climbs back up when all is quiet again.

3

The male does not spin his own web. He lives at the edge of the female's web.

4

To win a female, the male shakes her web fast and for a long time.

you asked

Most asked questions about Garden cross spider

?Where does the garden cross spider live?

In southern and eastern Asia, often close to people in gardens and around drains.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Argiope pulchella
Group
Spiders
Family
Araneidae
Classification
Arachnida > Araneae > Araneidae
Lives on
Asia

Where the facts come from

  1. Argiope pulchella (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by Jeevan Jose, Kerala, India. 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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