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Sticker of Walckenaer's feather-legged spider
Bug card No. 4608 of 4,939

Walckenaer's feather-legged spider

Uloborus walckenaerius
Name means: “named in honour of Charles Athanase Walckenaer”
Eats: Other bugs and small animalsSpidersGardens and meadows8 legsNot an insect, but a bug cousin

Walckenaer's feather-legged spider is a small grey and white spider with fluffy tufts of white hair. Instead it wraps its catch in a huge amount of silk.

Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
Europe and Asia, in warm open places like heathland
Length
3 to 6 mm (0.12 to 0.24 in)
Top speed
about 0.93 km/h (0.58 mph)
On foot, estimate
What does it eat?
It catches small insects in its web and wraps them up tightly in silk.
For real!Photo of Walckenaer's feather-legged spider
Picture by Alexandre Buisse ( Nattfodd ). CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Walckenaer's feather-legged spider about 6 mm long (0.24 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 fingernailcould run across a dinner table in 3.9 secondsmoves 43 times its own body length every second

How big is Walckenaer's feather-legged spider compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

It can use more than 140 metres of thread to tie up its prey. That is longer than a football pitch.

2

Its round web lies flat, close to the ground, and the spider hangs underneath the middle.

3

Its two front pairs of legs are much longer than the back pairs.

4

It has eight eyes in two neat rows of four.

5

It is named after Charles Athanase Walckenaer, a French spider scientist.

you asked

Most asked questions about Walckenaer's feather-legged spider

?How big is Walckenaer's feather-legged spider?

Females are 3.5 to 6 millimetres long and males 3 to 4 millimetres.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Uloborus walckenaerius
Group
Spiders
Family
Uloboridae
Classification
Arachnida > Araneae > Uloboridae
Lives on
Europe, Asia, Africa
Also known as
Feather-legged spider, Fluffy hackled orb-web spider

Where the facts come from

  1. Uloborus walckenaerius (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 Alexandre Buisse ( Nattfodd ). CC BY-SA 3.0, 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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