🕷️ Garden friends

People often call spiders bugs, but scientists put them in a different group than insects. Spiders have eight legs, while insects have six. Spiders also have a body split into two parts, while insects have three. On top of that, spiders do not have antennae, which almost every true insect has. Even though they are not technically insects, spiders share the outside world with them and often eat the very same bugs you have been learning about.

A spider has eight legs, two more than most bugs, so it is not really a bug at all.

A spider spins a sticky web to catch tiny bugs to eat, like a little net hanging in the air.

A spider spins a web using silk it makes inside its own body. It stretches sticky threads between branches or corners to catch flying or crawling bugs. When a bug bumps into the web, the sticky threads hold it in place. The spider feels the shaking through its legs and rushes over. Building a whole web can take less than an hour, and some spiders even eat their old web to reuse the silk.

A cricket chirps by rubbing one wing against the other, like running a tiny comb along its edge. Male crickets mostly chirp to attract a mate or to warn other crickets to stay away. Crickets chirp faster when it is warm outside and slower when it is cool.

A cricket rubs its two wings together to make a chirping sound, calling out to other crickets nearby.

Earthworms breathe through their moist skin. When heavy rain fills the tiny air spaces in the soil with water, worms wriggle up to the surface to get enough air. Rain also makes it easier for worms to slide across the ground, since their skin needs to stay wet to move. Once the soil dries out and lets air back in, worms usually head back underground.

After it rains, worms wiggle up out of the wet ground to breathe fresh air.