Black house spider
The black house spider is a dark, sturdy spider from Australia, covered in soft, velvety hair. It builds a messy web with a little silk tunnel in the middle or a corner. It loves window frames and doorways, where lights bring in insects at night.
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Fun facts
The female almost never leaves her web and stays in the same spot for a long time.
At night it comes out to fix its web, often just adding new silk on top of the old.
Old webs get very messy, with dust and little bits stuck all over them.
The mother guards her white egg sacs until the babies hatch.
The babies sometimes stay in their mother's web and catch the tiny insects she ignores.
Most asked questions about Black house spider
?Where does the black house spider live?
In Australia, New Zealand and Japan, on rough tree bark and around windows and doors of houses.
?How big is the black house spider?
The female's body is up to 18 millimetres long, and the male is smaller.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Badumna insignis
- Named by
- L. Koch, 1872
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Desidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Desidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania, Asia
- Also known as
- Common black spider
Where the facts come from
- Black house spider (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 steve_kerr. CC BY 4.0, 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 hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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