- Animals
- ›Arthropods
- ›Chelicerates
- ›Arachnids
- ›Spiders
- ›Typical Spiders
- ›Entelegyne Spiders
- ›Orbweavers and Allies

Comb-footed Spiders
Theridiidae
Theridiidae, also known as the tangle-web spiders, cobweb spiders and comb-footed spiders, is a large family of araneomorph spiders first described by Carl Jakob Sundevall in 1833. This diverse, globally distributed family includes around 3,000 species in 128 genera, and is the most common arthropod group found in human dwellings throughout the world.
Theridiid spiders are both entelegyne, meaning that the females have a genital plate, and ecribellate, meaning that they spin sticky capture silk instead of woolly silk. They have a comb of serrated bristles (setae) on the tarsus of the fourth leg.
19 branches of this family, most-observed first

Latrodectinae
subfamilyLatrodectinae

Theridiinae
subfamilyTheridiinae

Pholcommatinae
subfamilyPholcommatinae

Kleptoparasitic Spiders
subfamilyArgyrodinae

Hadrotarsinae
subfamilyHadrotarsinae

Spintharinae
subfamilySpintharinae

Anelosiminae
subfamilyAnelosiminae

Icona
genusIcona

Hetschkia
genusHetschkia

Gushangzao
genusGushangzao

Chorizopella
genusChorizopella

Tomoxena
genusTomoxena

Loricatheridion
genusLoricatheridion
Landoppo
genusLandoppo
Zercidium
genusZercidium
Glebych
genusGlebych
Knoflachia
genusKnoflachia
Gyro
genusGyro
Trust
genusTrust
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
—
geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Theridiidae in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 47371.