Bug card No. 0686 of 1,500

Green-fanged tube web spider

Segestria florentina

Eats: Other bugs and small animals SpidersHouses and farms8 legsNot an insect, but a bug cousin

It lives in a silk tube hidden in cracks in walls. From the opening, it spreads out silk trip lines and waits for a visitor.

Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!

Lives in

Around the Mediterranean, now also in towns in Britain, Ireland, Argentina and Australia, in cracks of walls

Length

1.5 to 2.2 cm (0.59 to 0.87 in)

Top speed

about 1.8 km/h (1.1 mph)

On foot, estimate

Can it hurt you?

Can bite or sting

What does it eat?

It catches night-flying insects such as moths and cockroaches, and even bees and wasps.

How big is it?

as long as 4 grains of rice in a rowcould run across a dinner table in 2 secondsmoves 23 times its own body length every second

Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.

A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)

Green-fanged tube web spider about 1.8 km/h (1.1 mph)

A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)

A kid running fast about 13 km/h (8.1 mph)

cool stuff

It keeps six of its legs on the trip lines, so it can feel the moment an insect touches one.

It probably came to Britain on ships, at least as early as 1845.

It likes warm, sunny walls that face south, especially brick buildings.

you asked

?How big is this spider?

Females can have a body up to 2.2 centimetres long, and males up to 1.5 centimetres.

Segestria florentina (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 Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez ( Lmbuga Commons )( Lmbuga Galipedia ). CC BY-SA 3.0, 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.