Many people suffer from arachnophobia, which is the fear of spiders. This goes after seeing spiders crawling with their hairy spindly legs.
However, many people have been sharing a close-up look of spider legs or what they call them “spider paws.” For spiders, those “paws” are called claw tufts and is just one of the eight parts that make up their legs. Let it not confuse you as well, they are not really paws, rather just a dense pads of hair.
These claw tufts are common among tarantulas and related spider groups.
“Claw tufts occur in a number of spider families that can run up vertical surfaces like walls and glass,” Robert Raven, head arachnologist at the Queensland Museum, told Cosmos Magazine.
The hair in the tufts is still covered by hundreds of other smaller hairs, called setules, that help the tarantulas climb surfaces with the use of electrical attraction.
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– A tarantula with no name
