Ms. Muffet's Guest

You remember the rhyme about Little Miss Muffet? She was sitting on a tuffet, having a snack, when she had an unexpected guest that scared her so. Her surprise visitor was, you guessed right, a spider. Like Miss Muffet, many people are afraid of spiders because of the way these animals look.
I remember this rhyme because when I see big spiders in our province which my brother afraid of. Anyway, what is a spider?
Spiders have eight legs and most of them have bodies covered with hair. Spiders may be short and fat, long and thin, round or flat. They are usually colored brown, grey or black, but some are s colorful as butterflies.
Spiders are not insects. They have eight legs, while insects like ants and beetles have six. Also, most insects have wings and feelers or antennae. Spiders have none of these.
There at least 29,000 kinds of spiders. Some of them are as small as pinheads, while the larger ones, like the tarantula of South America, are about 10 inches long.
A spider’s body has two main parts. One part is made up of the head and the chest, and the other apart is the abdomen. Each of these sections has appendages or attached parts. The pedicels, or the spider’s waist, connect the two main sections.
If you were to look at a spider face-to-face, you’d find that a spider’s face has several parts. You’d find that a spider’s face has a several parts. You would find a spider’s eyes, some kind of mouth opening, then the chelicerae, and fangs.
Most spiders have eight eyes arranged on the top of their heads in two rows of four eyes each. But some spiders have only two eyes, while others have four or six. Some spiders, which live in caves and other dark places, do not have eyes.
A spider’s mouth is just below its eyes. They do not chew and can eat some solid parts of their victim’s body by dissolving these parts with digestive juice and then sucking them. This juice is so strong that a tarantula, for example, can turn a mouse into a pile of hair and bones in about 36 hours.
The chelicerae, which are also just under the eyes, are a pair of appendages that a spider uses to catch and kill its prey. Each chelicera ends in a claw, which are the spider’s fangs. The tips of the fangs have openings, which are connected to the spider’s poison glands. When hunting other insects, spiders use the chelicerae for stabbing, and then let the poison flow to the victims through their fangs.
Each spider has four pairs of legs. Each leg has seven parts. The last part of the spider’s leg has two or three claws at a tip. A pad of hair surrounds the claws; these help the spider hold on to ceilings or walls.
Spiders also have spinnerets, which are like fingers attached to the end part of their abdomen. Most spiders have six spinnerets but others have four, and still others only two. These spinnerets are what the spiders use to spin silk. Liquid silk from the abdomen of the spiders flows through spinning tubes at the tip of the spinnerets. When this liquid silk flows outside the body of a spider, it hardens into thread. This thread is used in making webs.
All spiders spin silk, but not all spiders make webs. Spiders make webs in the air so they can trap flying insects. Web- spinning spiders make different kinds of webs. Webs may look like curtains, bowls, domes, tubes, circular mazes, triangles, or sheets. A spider avoids getting trapped in its own web by using the special claws on its feet.
Spiders are helpful to people because they eat harmful insects. A spider’s bite is deadly for insects, but only few spiders are harmful to human beings. These are mostly the “widow” spiders – the black widow, the brown widow, the red-legged widow, and the varied widow.
Many spiders live only a year but the large wolf spider can live up to several years. Tarantulas are believed to live the longest among spiders. Some can last for more than 20 years.
Now I know about these spiders. You must not be afraid of spiders; spiders are not like monsters that eat us like other animals they harm us when we harm them first. Spiders are like us so you must not fear them.