Jungle huntsman spider
Heteropoda jugulans
The jungle huntsman is a big, brown spider with long legs from eastern Australia. It has a black X shape on its head. It comes out at night to hunt and can run up walls, across windows and even along the ceiling.
Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
Eastern Australia, from Queensland to New South Wales, under tree bark and sometimes in houses
What does it eat?
It hunts insects at night, but it does not eat most cockroaches.
How fast is it?
Jungle huntsman spider about 3 km/h (1.9 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
A kid running fast about 13 km/h (8.1 mph)
A grown-up on a bike about 25 km/h (16 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
In the daytime it hides under the bark of trees.
2
At night it comes into houses, sheds and even letterboxes to hunt.
3
Males and females have about the same body size, but the males have longer legs.
4
There are at least 37 kinds of huntsman spiders like it in Australia, and they are very hard to tell apart.
you asked
Most asked questions about Jungle huntsman spider
?Why is a huntsman spider in my house?
It comes in at night to hunt insects, and it can climb walls and ceilings.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Heteropoda jugulans
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Sparassidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Sparassidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Brown huntsman
Where the facts come from
- Heteropoda jugulans (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 Eviatar Bach. CC0, 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.
Bug Wiki honey jar For grown-ups: Bug Wiki is free, with no ads and no tracking. A small tip helps keep it online.Leave a tip
European garden spider
Goliath birdeater
Brown recluse
Redback spider
Yellow garden spider
Bold jumping spider
Central European bicolored ant
South African bont tick
Hairy maggot blow fly
Green cellar slug
Trickling filter fly
Common shining cockroach