Wall spider
genus of arachnids
Wall spider is the common name for members of the genus Oecobius in the family Oecobiidae.
One cosmopolitan species is O. navus (sometimes also called O. annulipes).
One species of interest is Oecobius civitas. When a spider enters the home of another spider, rather than defend itself, the resident leaves to find another one.
Description
The members of these several species are all small spiders that make small flat webs over crevices in walls and in similar spaces. They are cribellate spiders, meaning that they produce silk through a sieve-like plate of many parallel spigots, so that it emerges in a bundle of many invisibly fine parallel fibres with no adhesive covering to glue them together. Instead the bundles part into separate woolly cables that readily entangle small prey items, such as ants, that run into them. The spider sits in middle of the web, and when it is disturbed by suitable prey, it runs out and circles the prey with more silk to tangle it further. It subdues the prey by biting it, and carries one or more items bundled in silk, seeking a refuge where it can feed.
Species
As of October 2025, this genus includes 98 species:
References
Further reading
Santos, A.J.; Gonzaga, M.O. (2003).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Wall spider” is genus of arachnids. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Wall, spider and genus, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “genus of arachnids” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3020810. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025 and 2003.
Current terminology should not be projected backward without checking the classification used when the underlying evidence was created. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wall spider” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.