Southern bolas spider
Mastophora cornigera
The southern bolas spider is an orb weaver that does not build a web at all. The grown-up female hunts with a single silk line that has a sticky drop at the end. She swings it to catch flying insects, a bit like a fishing line.
Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
North and Central America, from the United States to Nicaragua
What does it eat?
It eats flying insects that it catches on its sticky silk drop or grabs with its legs.
How fast is it?
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Southern bolas spider 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
1
Instead of a web, the adult female uses one silk line with one or more sticky drops on the end.
2
Males and young females do not use the sticky line. They catch their food with their legs.
3
It belongs to the orb weavers, a family that usually builds round webs, but bolas spiders do something different.
you asked
Most asked questions about Southern bolas spider
?How does the southern bolas spider catch food?
The grown-up female swings a silk line with a sticky drop on the end and catches insects with it.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Mastophora cornigera
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Araneidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Araneidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Mastophora cornigera (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 LOPEZ-MONCET André. 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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