Social house spider
Philoponella congregabilis
Name means: “hard-working community dwellers”
The social house spider is a small spider with a hump on its back. Unlike most spiders, it lives in a big group, and all the webs join together into one messy spider town.
Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
New South Wales in Australia, and brought by people to Christchurch in New Zealand
Length
3.5 to 6 mm (0.14 to 0.24 in)
females are bigger than malesWhat does it eat?
It eats small insects. It wraps them tightly in silk, then softens them with its own juices and slurps them up.
How big is it?
How long is it?
💅small enough to sit on your fingernail🍽️could run across a dinner table in 3.9 seconds⚡moves 43 times its own body length every second
How big is Social house spider compared to YOU?
Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
How fast is it?
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Social house spider about 0.93 km/h (0.58 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
Its webs often lie flat or sloping, not standing up like most round webs.
2
It likes to build on eaves, window sills, garages and sheds.
3
The mother's egg sac looks like a bit of rubbish in the web and holds about 20 eggs.
4
The young spiders stay in the group web for a long time, or leave to start a new colony.
you asked
Most asked questions about Social house spider
?Why do social house spiders live together?
They build their webs joined together in a big group, like a spider town.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Philoponella congregabilis
- Named by
- Rainbow, 1916
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Uloboridae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Uloboridae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Little humped spider
Where the facts come from
- Philoponella congregabilis (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 Lek Khauv. CC BY 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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