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| Wolf spiders | |
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| Wolf Spider | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Unrecognized taxon (fix): | Lycosoidea |
| Family: | Lycosidae Sundevall, 1833 |
| Diversity | |
| 124 genera, 2888 species | |
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A Wolf spider is a member of the group of spiders whose scientific name is the Lycosidae. Lycos means "wolf" in Greek. These spiders get their name from the way they hunt, which the people who named them thought was like the way wolves hunt. However, wolves hunt in packs but spiders are solitary animals. Their way of hunting is more like that of solitary cats such as the cheetahs.:55 They generally wait for their prey to wander close by, and then they rush in to kill it.:9
The wolf spiders belong to a large group. The smallest are less than 0.04 inches (1 mm) in body length. The largest are around 1.5 inches (38 mm) in body length. Some wolf spiders spend all of their lives above ground (taking the best shelter they can find), others dig burrows but come out of the burrows to wander about and hunt, and some spend almost all of their lives waiting for passing insects in their burrows.
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