Garden spider with insect prey

Garden spider

The European garden spider with its poignant life cycle and familiar orb web is the most well known spider in the UK. Found in almost every country in the northern hemisphere, garden spiders feed on flying insects such as butterflies, wasps and flies but tend to ignore smaller prey such as greenflies. When a female has mated, her body becomes swollen with eggs. She builds a silken egg sac in which to lay the eggs and dedicates the rest of her life to protecting them. Unable to leave the eggs to hunt and feed, she dies in late autumn before her spiderlings hatch out in May of the following year.

Scientific name: Araneus diadematus

Rank: Species

Common names:

  • Cross spider,
  • Diadem spider,
  • European garden spider,
  • Garden orb-web spider

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Distribution

The Garden spider can be found in a number of locations including: Europe, North America, United Kingdom, Wales, Ynys-hir nature reserve. Find out more about these places and what else lives there.

Habitats

The following habitats are found across the Garden spider distribution range. Find out more about these environments, what it takes to live there and what else inhabits them.

Behaviours

Discover what these behaviours are and how different plants and animals use them.

Additional data source: Animal Diversity Web

About

The European garden spider, diadem spider, cross spider, or cross orbweaver (Araneus diadematus) is a very common and well-known orb-weaver spider in Europe and parts of North America, in a range extending from New England and the Southeast to California and the northwestern United States and adjacent parts of southern Canada.

Individual spiders' colouring can range from extremely light yellow to very dark grey, but all European garden spiders have mottled markings across the back, with five or more large, white dots forming a cross. The white dots result from cells filled with guanine, which is a byproduct of protein metabolism.

Adult females range in length from 6.5 to 20 mm (0.26 to 0.79 in), while males range from 5.5 to 13 mm (0.22 to 0.51 in).

The third pair of legs of garden spiders are specialized for assisting in the spinning of orb webs. These spiders also use them to move around on their web without getting stuck. These legs are useful only in the web; while on the ground, these legs are of little value.[citation needed]

Since this tends to be a passive animal, it is difficult to provoke to bite—but if it does, the bite is just slightly unpleasant and completely harmless to humans.

The webs are built by the larger females who usually lie head down on the web, or in a nearby leaf (with a signal thread attached to a leg), waiting for prey to get entangled in the web. The prey is then quickly captured and wrapped in silk before being eaten. Orb spiders are said to eat their webs each night along with many of the small insects stuck to it. They have been observed doing this within a few minutes. A new web is then spun in the morning.

The much smaller male will approach the female cautiously to mate. If not careful, he could end up being eaten by her.

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Classification

  1. Life
  2. Animals
  3. Arthropods
  4. Arachnids
  5. Spiders
  6. Orb weavers
  7. Araneus
  8. Garden spider

Video collections

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  • Wild autumn Wild autumn

    Autumn - a time of great change, of breathtaking migrations, of high drama.

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