Habitats

Spiders and scorpions, cockroaches and crickets plus bees and bugs!

All creepy and crawly, these invertebrates have one thing in common, they’re all spineless. In other words, they all lack a backbone. Over 95% of all animals on the earth are invertebrates, and with more than 225,000 species, there are more invertebrates in Australia than the total of all other kinds of animals combined. It is estimated that there are 3 million individual insects for every human alive today, and their total mass equals around 12 times the weight of all living humans combined!

Australia is home to an abundance of weird and wonderful insects and spiders, each with their own unique quirks. The female golden orb weaver spider, for example, can be 100 times bigger than its male mate and the bull ant, one of the largest and most primitive ants in the world, still possesses a sting like its distant relatives the bees and wasps. But compared to us, most insects and spiders seem weird, anyway. They usually have at least six legs, twelve knees and elbows, possibly even four wings; they may have five hearts, but no lungs. Their ears, if they have any at all, may be on their legs, or even on their body, anywhere but on their head. They usually have five or more eyes, and two of these may even be on the back of the head to see who is sneaking up on them.

These animals live life on an entirely different scale to us. For their size, ants are the strongest animals in the world. They are capable of lifting objects many times their own weight – the equivalent of a human lifting an elephant – yet most of them cannot pull themselves free from a droplet of water.

Welcome to the world of Invertebrates!