Funnel weavers or grass spiders

Family Agelenidae Home <------

Tegenaria atrica. The house spider that frightens many North Europeans.

There are 28 species known in northern Europe, belonging to eight genera. Most spiders of this family have elongated spinners.
The common name of these spiders is 'funnel weavers', although they are also called 'cobweb' spiders.
These spiders weave a tubular funnel shaped web as a retreat at one end of the silken sheet of the web. Prey that lands on the sheet is caught and consumed inside the retreat.
The egg sac is made in the funnel and the male often stays with the female. As the second common name suggests, they can be found between grass.

Genus Agelena

Agelena labyrinthica male

There are thirty European species. They live in webs that are woven horizontally between grasses, brushes and tree roots.
The woven web looks like a wide spread funnel. Their thorax is flat and they have long and hairy legs.

The spider hides in a secondary tube-like web that is adjacent to the catching web.

Agelena labyrinthica female and male The spider lives in low vegetation and shrubs. The female guards her eggs until her death.
Agelena labyrinthica female	Agelena labyrinthica male
Agelena similis similar to A. labyrinthica but has a red-brown stripe on his belly.

Agelena gracilens	Agelena gracilens
Agelena gracilens	Agelena gracilens
Agelena sp.	Agelena sp.

Genus Coelotes

There are three known species in NW-Europe. The spider lives in forests where they construct a tubular funnel webs on the ground between wood and rocks.
A collar of silk is spun around the opening of the tube. The funnel is about 10 cm deep.
The female feeds her young by regurgitation and by sharing large prey until she dies. The size of these spiders varies between 8 and 15mm.

Coelotes terrestris (is very similar to C. atropos.

Genus Tegenaria

These spiders die a lot in clothes, brooms and vacuum cleaners. Eleven species are known in NW-Europe. Most species make sheet webs with a tubular retreat at one side. Females of the species living in houses are known to live for several years. The spider spends most of its times on its web but in the late summer and the autumn the male starts looking for a female. The long legged males start wandering through the house and sometimes frightens us. Males live with their mates for several weeks. The female remains with their egg sac until the spiderlings emerges and walk away.

Tegenaria atrica is between 6 and 10 mm large. Its markings are variable

The spiders originally lived in and around caves. They can run very fast on their long legs. They live on flies, ants and other insects. The web has a tube like living room and has in the front the shape of an upside down funnel where there are a lot of stumbling threads.   Below Tegenaria atrica male. This guy looks very mean. I caught him in the cellars of our laboratory and he could hardly fit in a jam jar. He died of heart failure before I could photograph him. Observe the wasp in the background to get an idea how big he was.

Youngsters just after hatching and after changing their skin. Note the light empty skins.

Tegenaria agrestris is also know in the USA as Hobo spider. She is also called Tegenaria aggressive or ' agressive house spider'. This spider was brought by the Pelgrim fathers to the USA. It was first discovered in 1930 and since the 1960s has become one of the commonest house spiders in the Pacific North West because it has almost no natural predator. Tegenaria gigantea seems to be one of its predators.
It was/is thought that a bite of this American spider would cause necrosis, a severe tissue damage. There are no records of this nasty behaviour of the European species.
Recent studies of Bennet and Vetter shows that all these believes are wrong. Often the spider is even blamed for necrosis outside the region where it lives (The four North-Western states of the USA and British Columbia in Canada). The message is: The hobo spider does not cause necrosis.

Tegenaria duellica (gigantea) ©Lionel Dabat	Tegenaria duellica by Mick Thomson
Tegenaria atrica	Tegenaria atrica
Tegenaria ferruginea	Tegenaria ferruginea
Tegenaria ferruginea	Tegenaria silvestris
Tegenaria ? male	Tegenaria ? male

Genus Textrix

Textrix denticulata. This beautiful spider is 6 - 8 mm long. The spider is very fast. It looks like a wolf spider but can be recognized by the large spinnerets at the back of the abdomen.
	male

Ed Nieuwenhuys, December 24, 2008
26 october 2005