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The goliath birdeater is the largest spider by mass

Its legs span about 30 centimetres and it can weigh over 170 grams

The goliath birdeater lives in the swamps of northern South America and hunts on the ground rather than in a web. Its fangs are long enough to pierce a human fingernail, though its venom is mild to people. Despite the name, it mostly eats insects, worms and the occasional small vertebrate.

Theraphosa blondi burrow lores
Guillaume Delaitre ยท CC BY 4.0 ยท licence ยท source

Where this comes from

Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Tags: spiders, amazon, arachnids

The goliath birdeater is the largest spider by mass: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?
Its legs span about 30 centimetres and it can weigh over 170 grams. The figure is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
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Yes. It sits on the Records & Extremes shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
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