Spiders

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds and wiegh,

Along came a spider who sat down beside her,

And frightened Miss Muffet away!

Curds are a dairy productobtained by coagulating milk in a process called curdling. Whey is the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained. The whole mess is similar to cottage cheese.

'Pepsis formosa' is the scientific, Latin or binomial name for the tarantula hawk wasp. The common name refers to the female's successful preying on far larger tarantula spiders. Specifically, the mother-to-be delivers a paralyzing sting near the spider's head. She then pulls the hapless, helpless spider below ground. She lays an egg on top of the spider and then closes up the burrow. She repeats these actions about twenty [20] times.

When the female tarantula hawk wasp is finished, she has about 20 eggs waiting to hatch into larvae. Each larva will have access to fresh food. In each of 20 burrows, they will feast upon their own immobilized, but still very much alive spider.

It depends what species you are referring to. There is the crane fly. It's scientific name is Nephrotoma.

You are probably referring to the cellar spider or the harvestmen. The cellar spider

is most likely the spider you are talking about. It's scientific name is Pholcus phalangioides. There harvestmen's scientific name is Hadrobunus grandis.

Superdomain Biota

Domain Eukaryota

Kingdom Animalia

Subkingdom Bilateria

Branch Protostomia

Infrakingdom Ecdysozoa

Superphylum Panarthropoda

Phylum Arthropoda

Subphylum Arachnomorpha

Infraphylum Cheliceriformes

Superclass Chelicerata

Epiclass Euchelicerata

Class Arachnida

Subclass Micrura

Infraclass Megoperculata

Order Araneae

Suborder Opisthothelae

Infraorder Araneomorphae

Superfamily Araneoidea

Family Theridiidae

Subfamily Latrodectinae

Genus Latrodectus

1. Species Latrodectus apicalis (Galapagos black widow spider).
2. Species Latrodectus hesperus (Western black widow spider).
3. Species Latrodectus variolus (Northern black widow spider).

1. (4) Subspecies Latrodectus mactans mactans(Southern black widow spider, black widow spider).
2. (5) Subspecies Latrodectus mactans tredecimguttatus (European black widow spider, Mediterranean black widow spider).

• Subspecies Latrodectus mactans tredecimguttatus is sometimes considered as a different species: Latrodectus tredecimguttatus.

Araneae is the scientific name for spiders.

There are tens of thousands of different kinds of spiders. Those that have been caught and classified have scientific names, but they frequently have common names if they regularly get noticed by people. There is no standard for these common names, so even within the same country the same species of spider could have more than one common name. In Canada, the same spider might have one common name in English and another common name in French.

In English we call the Salticidae "jumping spiders." But in Chinese they are called 蒼蠅虎 or just 蠅虎 (cang-ying hu or just ying hu). These words do not mean "jumping spider." They mean something like "blue fly tiger" (as in blue bot fly I guess) or just "fly tiger," i.e., they are predators of pesky flies just as tigers are predators of deer and other large mammals.

What are called "tarantulas" in the U.S. are in some places called "bird-eating spider." No spider eats more than the occasional bird, and not all spiders that do eat the occasional bird are tarantulas. "Tarantulas" is not a very good name, historically at least, because the name "tarantula" originally was given to a kind of wolf spider that is found in the region around the Italian city of Taranto. The scientific name for that kind of wolf spider is Lycosa tarantula and the general name in Latin for the "bird-eating" kind is Theraphosidae.