Spiders are hard to identify and to figure out the species, a microscope is required:

 TRUE

There are more than 50,000 species of spiders in the world, with over 100 families, though scientists think this is only a small amount of how many actually exist. With this many, identification is extremely challenging and in most cases requires a microscope. Many, many people think they can look at a book with a few families represented and simply match the pictures to the specimen but this is not a reliable way to identify spiders.

Arachnid experts (and these are few and far between) cannot tell just by looking at a spider, be it the actual animal or a photo of the animal, what kind of spider it is. To determine a spider down to its species, some features they look at are eye arrangement (most spiders have 8 eyes), arrangement of the sensory hairs, spines and claws at the end of their legs.

They look at all of these things through a microscope.

Below is an example of some of the eye arrangements in spiders–this was taken from Rod Crawford’s page about spider myths.

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3. Spiders don’t eat their prey, they “suck” the juices from it.

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