Spiders are very important in sort of the whole web of life. They are predators, so
they do eat other insects, other arthropods that you perhaps would dislike more than spiders.
It's thought that probably the spiders on one acre of woodland could eat about 80 pounds
of insects in a year.
A spider is quite different from an insect. Spiders have eight legs. They have two main
body parts, unlike an insect that has three body parts.
This is the cephalothorax, which is a head and thorax in one. And she has an abdomen
attached to that.
And at the front, the things that also look a bit like legs, but they're shorter - they
are pedipalps. They're actually used for helping her to hold onto her food. They also have
chemoreceptors on them so that she has a kind of sense like smell and taste when she's exploring
her world.
No. They're not out to attack you. A lot of people are nervous of spiders, but the vast
majority of spiders are not dangerous to humans. And most spiders want to get away from you.
Out of more than 45,000 known species of spiders, probably only about 200 species have venom
that could actually cause any problem to humans.
The exhibit is called Spiders Alive!, basically because we're going to have a lot of different
live spiders on exhibit for people to see. We're going to have a demonstration area where
we're going to have several live spiders available so that people can actually engage more with
the spiders and also get a chance to also ask questions.
This is a Chilean Rose Hair Tarantula. We're using the Chilean Rose Hairs for the demonstration
area because they are one of the most docile species. This species of spider doesn't tend
to bite.
Not all spiders make webs. All spiders have the capacity to make silk. Even though the
tarantula is a hunter, they don't use a web to catch prey. They do make silk and they
do use it to lay down silk lines as trails and also to line their burrow.
There are many species of spiders that do use their webs. They build large webs to catch
their prey. Relatively few species make the traditional Charlotte's Web shape of web.
A lot of webs are sort of three dimensional. There are funnel web spiders, there are sheet
web spiders that just build their webs amongst the grass.
So, they can look a lot of different shapes.