A spider has eight legs and two body parts, while an insect has three body parts, so a spider is not an insect. Most spiders have eight eyes, though some have fewer. Spiders do not hear the way humans do, but they hear with hairs on their body that are sensitive to touch and vibration. Spiders rely on touch, vibration and taste to navigate and find their prey. Most spiders are harmless to people, and spiders very rarely bite people. Leave wild spiders alone, and tell a grown-up if you find one.

An orb weaver lays a non-sticky temporary spiral line first, starting from the centre and running outwards, and then it removes and rolls up that spiral line as it lays down the sticky spiral line. The extra silk is eaten and recycled, which returns the silk protein to the silk glands to make new silk. It takes about 30 to 45 minutes to make the web. Orb webs are an efficient way to catch flying insects, and they need relatively little silk and can be finished quickly. The web is clearly visible only when it is covered with dew.

There are four types of spider webs: orb webs, sheet webs, funnel webs, and cobwebs, which are sometimes called tangle webs. Orb weavers wait in their webs or nearby for insects to get stuck. Funnel weavers spin thick, flattened webs and sit at the center of a silken hole, or funnel. The funnel webs of grass spiders and barn funnel weavers have no sticky strands, so they do not trap insects. About half of spiders create webs not for catching insects but as hiding places. Bolas spiders are descended from spiders that wove orb webs, and at night they hunt male moths, which are their only prey.

Orb webs all follow the same general pattern. A spider begins with a messy protoweb and replaces it with the frames, spokes and hub of the final web. In a 2021 study of a species of tiny spiders that spin webs at night, scientists showed that web making follows rules that were the same for every spider. Researchers who studied how spiders build webs hope next to learn how the stages of web building are encoded in the spider's brain.

Spiders use silk to protect their young, catch food, make homes and move around, and silk starts as a liquid stored in internal silk glands and hardens into a solid form before the spider uses it. A strand of spider silk is five times stronger than a steel cable of the same weight, said Hannes Schniepp of William & Mary. The strength of dragline silk is greater than that of mild steel and almost all man-made fibres, though Kevlar is an exception, and it is typically only about 0.001 mm to 0.004 mm thick. Silk gets its stretchiness from loose, coil-like protein chains and its stiffness and strength from highly ordered protein crystals.

Words to know

• protoweb: first rough web
• hub: web center
• recycled: used again
• spiral: winding curve