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Spider

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Damian Yerrick (talk | contribs) at 11:18, 26 May 2002 (poison vs. venom: it's poison if you eat it; it's venom if it eats you). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A spider is an invertebrate animal with eight legs belonging to the order Araneae in the class Arachnida, in the subphylum Cheliceriformes of the phylum Arthropoda.

Many spiders hunt by building webs to trap insects; these webs are made of spider silk, a thin, strong protein strand extruded by the spider.

Spiders, unlike insects, have their bodies divided in two segments: prosoma or cephalothorax (a fused head and thorax) and abdomen.

Some important aspects of spiders:

  • Digestion is carried out internally and externally. The spider injects a venom into its prey to dissolve the prey's internals. Then, the spider feeds by sucking them.
  • Blood does not circulate through vessels, it just fills the body of the spider. This is called an open circulatory system. A book lung and/or tracheae enrich the blood with oxygen.
  • They reproduce by eggs, and the male is usually exposed to being killed by the female before or after the coupling.

Over 37,000 species of spiders have been identified.

Sources

  1. Spider info by Ed Nieuwenhuys

Web crawlers, automated software agents that gather pages from the World Wide Web are also known as spiders.


A spider is a frothy drink made from soft drink (soda), flavouring and ice cream.