Featherleg Spider

• It is one of the very few spiders in the world with no venom glands at all: it kills its prey by swathing them in hundreds of metres of silk until they are crushed.
• Its silk is not sticky: it is cribellate, a weave of thousands of extremely fine fibres that traps insects by electrostatic entanglement rather than by adhesion.
• It has spread across northern Europe on the back of the warm, stable climate of greenhouses.
• It has no venom glands. It is one of the very few spiders in the world without venom, and kills its prey by wrapping it in silk until it suffocates or is crushed.
• Its silk is cribellate: instead of glue, it produces thousands of extremely fine, combed filaments that entangle prey mechanically.
• In English it is called the garden centre spider, because in northern Europe it lives almost exclusively in glasshouses.
• The tufts of hair on its front legs, which give it the name feather-legged spider, distinguish it from its congener Uloborus walckenaerius.

Habitat & environment

Greenhouses, nurseries and heated buildings; originally, Mediterranean scrub

Sources consulted: Lucas (1846); Animalia; British Arachnological Society