Spiders Stats & Facts

FACTS

1. Studies have shown that you’re never more than ten feet away from a spider, and one estimate puts you as close as three feet.
2. To be “spider-free” you’d have to go into space in a fumigated capsule.
3. Unlike insects, spiders cannot fly–but they can balloon! Young spider lings pull out silk until the breeze can lift them into the sky. Most don’t travel high or far, but some have been seen at altitudes of 10,000 feet and on ships more than 200 miles from land. Most ballooners are very small spider lings, but adult spiders have been captured by planes with nets.
4. Female wolf spiders carry their egg sacs behind them, attached to their spinnerets. After the spiders emerge, they crawl onto the mother’s abdomen and hold on while she actively runs and hunts. After about a week, the spider lings molt to a larger size and then take off to live on their own.
5. Some spiders live underwater all of their lives. They surface to collect a bubble of air, which acts as an underwater lung. An underwater spider fills its bell-shape web with air bubbles and derives oxygen from them.
6. The fisher or raft spider is able to walk across the surface of a pond or other body of water by skating like a water strider. When it detects prey (insects or tiny fish) under the surface, it can quickly dive to capture its dinner.
7. Male spiders are almost always smaller than the females and are often much more colorful. Some males are so small that they actually look like they’re newly hatched.

STATS

• Only a few of the bites of widow spiders were medically serious, but over 80% of recluse bites were considered serious. About 10% of other spider bites had serious consequences. These numbers seem small when compared to the over 800,000 dog bites that required stitches each year (source: Centers for Disease Control). Were associated with 130 annual deaths.
• There were no spider- related fatalities during that 4 – year period.
• It is estimated that up to 1 million spiders live in one acre of land–in the tropics, that the number might be closer to 3 million.
• It is estimated that up to 1 million spiders live in one acre of land–in the tropics, that the number might be closer to 3 million.
• While most spiders live for one year, a few may have more than one generation each year. Some spiders can live 3 to 4 years, and certain tarantulas are known to live for 25 years or longer.