Label the Body Parts of a Tarantula

All 8 parts on the diagram

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Carapace The hard plate on top of the front body section, the cephalothorax.
Fovea A pit or groove in the center of the carapace. Inside the body, stomach muscles are attached there.
Eyes Small eyes on a low mound, usually in two rows of four. Most tarantulas see little more than light, dark and movement.
Chelicerae The two jaws in front of the mouth. The venom glands are inside them and each one ends in a fang.
Pedipalps Two six-segmented, leg-like limbs, one on each side of the chelicerae. They are not walking legs.
Abdomen The rear body section, also called the opisthosoma. A thin waist joins it to the front section.
Urticating hairs Barbed hairs that irritate skin and eyes. Most American tarantulas kick them off the abdomen with their back legs; tarantulas from Asia and Africa have none.
Spinnerets Flexible tubes at the end of the abdomen that let out silk. A tarantula has two or four.

How this list was compiled: Every name checked on 2026-09-30 in at least two of these: Wikipedia (Tarantula, Spider anatomy, Glossary of spider terms), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantula; J. H. Comstock, The Spider Book (1912), chapter on external anatomy, https://archive.org/details/thespiderbook00coms; Hamilton, Hendrixson and Bond (2016), ZooKeys 560, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4768370/; Perafan and others (2016), ZooKeys 601; Hamilton and others (2011), PLoS ONE 6(10); San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and Texas A&M AgriLife tarantula pages. The sources list says which source gave what. Detail lines are in our own words. Licence: own work

The drawing: Drawn for this site on 2026-09-30 from plain geometry; nothing traced. Licence: own work

How it works

To label the body parts of a tarantula, write a name on the line for each number. Eight numbers ring a tarantula seen from above, from the shield over its front half to the two tips behind the abdomen.

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Tarantula worksheet word bank

Eight names, in alphabetical order: abdomen, carapace, chelicerae, eyes, fovea, pedipalps, spinnerets, urticating hairs. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 are all on the front shield: 1 is the whole plate, 2 the dent in its middle, 3 the cluster of dots near its front edge. Number 4 is the pair of stout jaws, and 5 the pair of short limbs beside them.

Cephalothorax, legs and pedipalps

Cephalothorax, or prosoma, names the whole front section of the body; the carapace at 1 is only the plate on top of it. The eight legs are drawn and have no number. A pupil who counts ten legs has counted the pedipalps at 5.

When marking, jaws is right on line 4, palps on line 5 and opisthosoma on line 6.
Thoracic furrow or foveal groove is right on line 2, and barbed hairs on line 7.
For coloring in: most North American tarantulas are brown.

Questions and answers

Is a tarantula a spider?

Yes. Tarantulas are the large, often hairy spiders of the family Theraphosidae, and more than a thousand species have been named.

Do tarantulas spin webs?

Not to catch food. Every tarantula makes silk, which comes out of the spinnerets at number 8. Ground-living kinds line their burrows with it, and tree-living kinds make a silk tube to live in. They hunt by ambush.

Why does a tarantula molt?

To grow. A tarantula's skeleton is on the outside, and it sheds it from time to time: several times a year when young, once a year or less when full-grown. A molt also replaces lost legs and lost urticating hairs.

What is a tarantula's strongest sense?

Touch, not sight. The bristles on its body, called setae, are sense organs, and a hunting tarantula depends mainly on the vibrations its prey gives off.

Does the tarantula worksheet have an answer key?

Yes. The key prints the tarantula with its numbers and lists the eight names in order, carapace first and spinnerets last.