Cupboard spider
The cupboard spider is a dark brown or purplish black spider with a round, shiny body. It looks a bit like a black widow, but it has no red hourglass mark. It likes dark, quiet corners, like the back of a cupboard.
How big is it?
How long is it?
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Fun facts
It cannot see well, so it feels the shaking of its web to know when food has landed.
It can go several months without food, as long as it has water to drink.
A mother spider can lay three or more egg sacks a year, with 40 to 100 eggs in each one.
A female can live up to six years, which is very long for a spider.
A cupboard spider played the famous spider that bit Peter Parker in the 2002 Spider-Man film. It was painted red and blue.
Most asked questions about Cupboard spider
?How big is a cupboard spider?
About 4 to 10 millimetres long. The females are rounder than the males.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Steatoda grossa
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Theridiidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Theridiidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Dark comb-footed spider, Brown house spider, False widow, False black widow
Where the facts come from
- Steatoda grossa (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 Ryan Kaldari. CC0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same 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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