Spider Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
48 free Spider trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
50 free Spider trivia questions with answers. Spiders eat more prey by weight each year than humans eat meat, one species is a vegetarian, one lives underwater, and one in Madagascar spins a web across a river. This quiz covers all of it: how spiders are built (no antennae, hydraulic legs, book lungs, six kinds of silk), the record holders (Goliath birdeater, giant huntsman, Patu digua, Darwin's bark spider), the dangerous ones (black widows, redbacks, brown recluses, Sydney funnel-webs) and the clever ones (Portia, bolas spiders, peacock spiders). It finishes with the culture: Arachne and Minerva, Charlotte's Web, Little Miss Muffet and where the word tarantula came from. Questions run from easy ones for kids who like creepy-crawlies to hard ones for people who know their Mesothelae from their Mygalomorphae. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on spiders and the individual species, and each question shows its source. Good for a nature quiz, a classroom or a Halloween round.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Spiders belong to which order?
Araneae
Araneae is the order of spiders, with more than 50,000 described species placed in over 130 families worldwide.
Q 02Which is the only continent with no spiders?
Antarctica
Antarctica is the only continent with no spiders; every other continent has them, including a jumping spider recorded on Everest's slopes above 6,000 metres.
Q 03Unlike insects, spiders lack which sensory feature on their heads?
Antennae
Spiders have no antennae; insects smell and feel with antennae, while spiders rely on sensory hairs and slit organs spread over their legs and body.
Q 04How do spiders extend their legs, since they have no extensor muscles?
Hydraulic pressure
Hydraulic pressure: spiders extend their legs by pumping hemolymph into them, since two leg joints have no extensor muscles; a dead spider's legs curl inward once that pressure is gone.
Q 05Which jumping spider was first reported in 2008 to feed mostly on plant matter?
Bagheera kiplingi
Bagheera kiplingi, a Central American jumping spider, gets most of its food from protein-rich leaf-tip nubs grown by an ant-guarded tree; no other spider is known to eat mainly plant food.
Q 06Roughly how much prey do the world's spiders eat each year, according to one estimate?
400 to 800 million tons
A 2017 estimate put it at 400 to 800 million tons of prey a year, killed by a global spider population weighing about 25 million tons.
Q 07In which property does dragline spider silk beat both steel and Kevlar?
Toughness
Toughness means energy absorbed before breaking; silk's stretchiness is what makes it so hard to snap.
Q 08Darwin's bark spider, discovered in Madagascar in 2009, holds what record?
Largest orb webs ever found
Darwin's bark spider builds the largest orb webs ever found, slung across rivers on bridge lines up to 25 metres long with capture areas of up to about 2.8 square metres.
Q 09Which is the world's largest spider by mass and body length?
Goliath birdeater
The Goliath birdeater, a tarantula of northern South America, is the heaviest spider, with a body up to about 13 cm long and a mass of up to around 175 grams.
Q 10Males of Patu digua, a Colombian contender for smallest spider, are about the size of what?
A fifth of a pinhead
About a fifth of a pinhead: male Patu digua measure around 0.37 mm in body length, smaller than a grain of sand.
Q 11Which family, with about 7,000 species, is the largest of all, making up 13% of the order?
Salticidae
Salticidae, the jumping spiders, is the largest spider family with more than 6,000 described species; its members hunt by sight using large forward-facing principal eyes.
Q 12Which salticid genus is famous for eating its own kind and improvising hunting tactics?
Portia
Portia, a jumping spider that preys on other spiders, improvises tactics such as plucking a web to mimic struggling prey, and remembers which tricks worked.
Q 13The dancing peacock spiders of the genus Maratus are native to which country?
Australia
Peacock spiders are Australian; nearly all Maratus species live only in Australia, where males about 4 to 5 mm long raise coloured abdominal flaps and dance for females.
Q 21After antivenom arrived in 1981, how many Sydney funnel-web deaths were recorded through 2021?
None
None: the 13 recorded deaths from Sydney funnel-web bites all came between 1927 and 1980; after the antivenom's 1981 release no fatality was recorded through 2021.
Q 22Who first described the Sydney funnel-web in 1877, naming it Atrax robustus?
Octavius Pickard-Cambridge
Octavius Pickard-Cambridge, an English clergyman and arachnologist, named Atrax robustus in 1877; the species name robustus is Latin for sturdy.
Q 23Roughly how many tarantula species have been identified in the family Theraphosidae?
Over 1,000
Over 1,000 tarantula species have been described, spread across well over 100 genera; New World species defend themselves by flicking irritating barbed hairs from the abdomen.
Q 14Which is the only species known to live almost entirely underwater?
The diving bell spider
The diving bell spider eats, mates and lays eggs inside an air-filled silk bell anchored to water plants, surfacing only to top up its oxygen supply.
Q 15Bolas spiders catch moths by doing what?
Swinging a sticky ball on a line
They lure male moths in with up to three fake sex pheromones, then reel them in like an angler.
Q 16What is the name for the way small spiders travel by releasing fine threads and riding the wind?
Ballooning
Ballooning: the spider releases silk threads that catch the wind or atmospheric electric fields and lift it off, which is how spiders have been found hundreds of kilometres out at sea.
Q 17Which two spiders are the only ones in North America with venom considered dangerous to people?
Brown recluse and black widow
The brown recluse and the black widow are the only North American spiders whose venom is considered medically significant; recluse venom destroys tissue, widow venom attacks the nervous system.
Q 18How many eyes does a brown recluse have, unlike most spiders?
Six
They sit in three pairs; the violin mark on its back is not a reliable identifier because other spiders have it too.
Q 19Black widows, redbacks and the New Zealand katipō all belong to which genus?
Latrodectus
Latrodectus is the widow genus; its latrotoxin venom causes latrodectism, and its roughly three dozen species include South Africa's button spiders.
Q 20The Australian redback is one of a number of spiders that usually do what while mating?
Eat the male
Eat the male: during redback mating the male somersaults onto the female's fangs and is usually consumed, a sacrifice that lengthens copulation and raises his share of paternity.
Q 24Wolf spiders carry their egg sacs how?
Attached to their spinnerets
Attached to their spinnerets: a female wolf spider drags her round egg sac behind her, and once the young hatch they ride on her back for days.
Q 25Male giant huntsman spiders in Laos reach a leg span of about how much?
25 to 30 cm
About 25 to 30 cm: Heteropoda maxima, described from Laotian caves in 2001, has the widest leg span of any spider, though heavier tarantulas outweigh it.
Q 26Which spider family has no venom glands, subduing prey with silk alone?
Uloboridae
Uloboridae, the hackled orb-weavers, have no venom glands at all; they wrap prey tightly in silk and crush it before feeding.
Q 27Arachnophobia affects roughly what share of the world's population?
3.5 to 6.1%
About 3.5 to 6.1% of people worldwide are estimated to have arachnophobia, one of the most common specific phobias, though very few spiders can harm a person.
Q 28In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the weaver Arachne becomes a spider after challenging which goddess?
Minerva (Athena)
Minerva (Athena): in Ovid's telling the Lydian weaver Arachne matches the goddess in a weaving contest, is struck in fury and, after hanging herself, is turned into a spider.
Q 29In E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, what is the first phrase Charlotte weaves to save Wilbur?
Some Pig
'Some Pig' is the first message Charlotte weaves in the 1952 book; 'Terrific', 'Radiant' and 'Humble' follow, and her full name, Charlotte A. Cavatica, echoes the barn spider's Latin name.
Q 30Little Miss Muffet, frightened away by a spider, was eating what?
Curds and whey
Curds and whey: the rhyme, first printed in 1805 in Songs for the Nursery, has Miss Muffet eating the two on her tuffet when the spider sits down beside her.