Did you know spiders have miniature paw-like feet on the bottom of their eight legs? When you can’t see the rest of the creature, they are honestly kind of adorable. Most pictures below are of tarantula legs, evidently, the largest spiders seemingly have the cutest feet. The next time you encounter an arachnid, the chances that you think it is adorable instead of terrifying seem slim, but maybe you will be slightly more at ease knowing they have adorable little paws.
These strange features that spiders posses are called claw tuft’s.
The paws are not really paws in the sense you are familiar with, claw tufts are rather just really dense bundles of hair.
This Pink Toed Tarantula has some of the cutest paws yet!
Weighing in at a two and a half ounces, it is seemingly harmless! They might just flick their hair at you if they feel threatened…
The combination of vibrant color and soft looking tufts of fur make for one adorable paw!
The size of the claw may come as a surprise, they can actually get quite large!
This tuft of densely packed fur can be attributed to the spiders ability to adhere strongly to many surfaces, such as walls and glass.
Web dwelling spiders have three smaller claws (seen in figure A), two for hunting and one specially adapted for holding onto their web.
If it was not for this third claw in web dwelling spiders, they would not be able to knit webs!
Hunting spiders (most pictures in this post), only have two claws and a tuft of hair.
The tuft has around 600,000 tiny furs which can be found on more than 900 species of tarantula.
Spiders in this group have much stronger senses than their cousins.
The ability to hear and see better support their hunting lifestyle.
More formally called the tarsus, Spiders sense of hearing and smell is located here in the tuft.
These long hollow hairs, called trichobothria, are used for sensing air currents and vibrations help the spider hunt.
Most spiders actually digest food outside of the mouth.
They do this by injecting their prey with digestive fluid before slurping out their liquefied internal tissues.
Once they have slurped the shell clean, they discard it and move onto the next prey.
You cannot deny, even though attached to a creepy creature the paw is adorable, and in extremely rare cases, the spider itself is pretty cute.
Look at this little spider, it is undeniably cute!
At the end of the day, regardless of how cute or adorable their feet might be, they are still spooky little monsters. It is good to know that not every part of them is hideous. Next time you see a spider you might just slightly hesitate before squishing it.