Wheel spider
The wheel spider lives in the sand dunes of the Namib Desert in Africa. When danger comes, it does something amazing: it flips onto its side and cartwheels down the dune like a little wheel. It hunts at night and does not make a web.
How big is it?
How long is it?
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How fast is it?
Fun facts
While rolling it can spin up to 44 times in one second.
Rolling down a dune it travels about 1 metre every second.
It digs a burrow 40 to 50 centimetres deep and lines it with silk.
To dig its burrow it can move up to 10 litres of sand, which is 80,000 times its own weight.
Its main enemy is a wasp that digs into the sand to find it. Rolling away is its last escape trick.
Most asked questions about Wheel spider
?Why is it called the wheel spider?
Because it escapes by rolling sideways down sand dunes like a wheel.
?Where does the wheel spider live?
Only in the sand dunes of the Namib Desert in southern Africa.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Carparachne aureoflava
- Named by
- Lawrence, 1966
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Sparassidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Sparassidae
- Lives on
- Africa
- Also known as
- Golden wheel spider
Where the facts come from
- Wheel 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 Daniel S. Katz. 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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