Spider Trivia
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47 free Spider trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Spiders belong to which order?
Araneae
Araneae are the true spiders; the look-alike harvestmen belong to a separate order, Opiliones, and give themselves away with a body in one piece, just two eyes and no silk.
Q 02Which is the only continent with no spiders?
Antarctica
Antarctica is the only continent with no spiders; elsewhere they reach even the high slopes of Mount Everest, where one tiny species hunts flies and springtails among the rocks.
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 straighten their legs at the joints that have no extensor muscles?
Hydraulic pressure
Hydraulic pressure: muscles in the body squeeze blood into the legs to straighten them, which is why a dead spider's legs curl inward once the pressure is gone.
Q 05The spider genus Bagheera takes its name from a black panther in which children's classic?
The Jungle Book
The Jungle Book: the genus honours its panther and the species name kiplingi its author, although the spider itself turned out to live mostly on plant food.
Q 06By one 2017 estimate, roughly how much prey do the world's spiders kill each year?
400 to 800 million tons
400 to 800 million tons, over nine-tenths of it insects and springtails; where spiders were removed from test plots, insect numbers rose sharply.
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, which lives beside rivers in Madagascar, 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, can weigh about 175 grams; despite its name, it rarely eats birds.
Q 10Males of Patu digua, a Colombian contender for the world's smallest spider, measure about how long?
0.37 mm
0.37 mm, well under the width of a pinhead; it is only a contender because a Samoan cousin, the moss spider, measures almost exactly the same.
Q 11Which is the largest spider family, with around 7,000 described species?
Salticidae
Salticidae, the jumping spiders, account for about 13% of all known spider species; they pounce on their prey instead of snaring it in a web.
Q 12Which jumping spider genus is famous for hunting other spiders and improvising its 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 21Which Australian spider has killed no one since its antivenom arrived in 1981?
Sydney funnel-web
Sydney funnel-web: only the wandering males are known to have killed, and no death from a bite has been recorded since the antivenom came into use.
Q 22Number 16, the oldest spider on record when she died aged about 43, was what kind of spider?
A trapdoor spider
A trapdoor spider: she spent her whole life in a single burrow, checked on by researchers from 1974, and beat a record held by a 28-year-old tarantula.
Q 23Many tarantulas of the Americas defend themselves by flicking what at an attacker?
Irritating hairs
Q 14Which is the only spider known to live almost entirely underwater?
The diving bell spider
The diving bell spider lives in an air-filled silk bell among water plants; the bell works like a gill, drawing oxygen from the water, so it seldom has to surface.
Q 15Bolas spiders catch moths by doing what?
Swinging a sticky ball on a line
Swinging a sticky ball on a line: the spider swings its 'bolas' at male moths, which it draws within reach with a scent that mimics a female moth's.
Q 16What is the name for the way small spiders travel by releasing fine threads and riding the wind?
Ballooning
Ballooning: the spider lets out silk threads that are lifted by the wind and even by the atmosphere's electric field, and it can be carried hundreds of kilometres.
Q 17Which two spiders are the best known in North America for venom that can seriously harm people?
Brown recluse and black widow
Brown recluse and black widow: the recluse's venom can destroy skin tissue around the bite, while the widow's is a nerve poison that brings on severe muscle pain and cramps.
Q 18The brown recluse is nicknamed for a mark shaped like which instrument?
Violin
Violin, hence 'fiddleback', though other spiders carry similar marks; the surer sign is its six eyes in three pairs, where most spiders have eight.
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.
Irritating hairs: the spider kicks them off its abdomen with its back legs, and they inflame an attacker's skin and eyes.
Q 24How do wolf spiders carry their egg sacs?
Attached to their spinnerets
Attached to their spinnerets: the female holds the round sac clear of the ground at the tip of her abdomen, and once the young hatch they ride on her back.
Q 25The giant huntsman of Laos has the widest leg span of any spider; about how wide?
30 cm
30 cm, about the length of a school ruler, although its body is under 5 cm long; the species was only described in 2001, from a cave.
Q 26Spiders of the family Uloboridae are unusual because they lack what?
Venom glands
Venom glands: these hackled orb-weavers make up for it by wrapping prey in so much silk that it is crushed.
Q 27A spider's gut is too narrow for solids, so what does it do to prey before feeding?
Floods it with digestive fluid
Floods it with digestive fluid: the spider vomits enzymes over or into its catch, then sucks the liquefied meal back up and discards the hard parts.
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 message 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 was first printed in 1805, and a popular but unproven story makes Miss Muffet the daughter of Thomas Muffet, a Tudor doctor who studied spiders.