Black purseweb spider
The black purseweb spider has a shiny black body and chocolate brown legs. The female lives hidden inside a silk tube and almost never comes out. That makes her one of the hardest spiders to find.
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Fun facts
The species was first named in 1842, but nobody described a female until 1980.
That is because the males wander around looking for mates, while the females stay in their tubes.
With its legs stretched out, a male is about 3 centimetres across.
In the state of Connecticut it is a species that people watch over carefully.
Most asked questions about Black purseweb spider
?Why are female black purseweb spiders so hard to find?
They spend their lives hidden inside silk tubes, while only the males wander about.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Sphodros niger
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Atypidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Atypidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Sphodros niger (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 G. Blagoev, Centre for Biodiversity Genomics. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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