Spiders are one of the most successful, diverse, and sometimes profoundly weird, groups of animals of the world. They range the gamut from: carnivores to herbivores, the highly intelligent to the nearly vegetable-like, active hunters to ambush hunters, tree-dwellers to burrow-dwellers to underwater-dwellers, the highly compact/sturdy to the long/fragile, pitch-black to translucent-white, the camouflaged to the brightly colored, the bird-killing to the fly-catching, the tropical to the temperate, etc.

They are found on all continents except Antarctica, rank 7th in total species diversity amongst all other orders of organisms on Earth, and are found in nearly every type of habitat on the planet — other than in the oceans, and in the air. And they have been around for at least 318 million years. Some of the longer-lived species can live for at least as long as 25 years.
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