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Answer: Fiddleback or Violin Spider

The brown recluse is also known as the fiddleback, brown fiddler or violin spider because of the shape of the rear of its thorax. Although rarely fatal, you will certainly know it if you are bitten by one of these: the wound is deep, painful and takes a long time to heal. This is not the most dangerous of the recluse family, though -- that honour belongs to the Chilean recluse spider, or corner spider, whose bite is often fatal to humans.

The natural habitat of the brown recluse is inside rotting tree bark, so when it comes inside human dwellings it generally seeks dry and undisturbed places such as cellars and garages. Its presence is sometimes given away by the presence of an asymmetrical web. Since their web does not tend to attract prey, they usually leave their domain at night to hunt for crickets, cockroaches and other soft-bodied insects.

Answer: Tiger Spider

'Arana Tigre' in Spanish, this is the Chilean Tiger Spider, also known as the long-legged spider for obvious reasons -- its legs are between three and four times the length of its body. This is the best-known of the 150 species of the 'Scytodidae' family of 'spitting spiders'.

They catch their prey by spitting a sticky fluid that quickly congeals and immobilizes the victim. The tiger spider then injects the immobilized victim with a poison. This hunting method enables the tiger to catch prey significantly larger than itself.

The normal diet of the tiger spider is flies, mosquitoes, bees, horseflies and other insects, but it also eats other spiders, notably the highly-venomous Chilean recluse spider.

Answer: Skull Spider

This species of cellar spider, originally native to warmer regions of Eurasia and Africa but now found worldwide, is also known as a skull spider. Generally non-aggressive, it reacts to perceived threats by violently shaking its web. If handled roughly, this spider's legs easily become detached, a mechanism designed to allow it to escape some predators.

The primary diet of a skull spider consists of woodlice, mosquitoes and other insects, but it also kills and eats other spiders including some significantly larger than itself. It is also known to be cannibalistic.

Answer: Woodlouse Spider

The woodlouse spider (also sometimes called the sowbug killer or the pillbug hunter) feeds exclusively on woodlice, an isopod crustacean commonly found in homes and gardens.

During the day, woodlouse spiders can be found in their tent-like webs, usually under or close to wood. At night, they leave their webs to hunt, using specially-adapted mouthpieces to pierce the hard exoskeleton of their prey. They have been known to bite humans, but their venom causes no more than a localized itchiness.

Answer: Ladybird Spider

Males of this species have a black head and thorax, and a distinctive red colouring with four black dots at the posterior end. The similarity of the colouring to a member of the British beetle family gives this species its common name, the ladybird spider.

Still common in Central and Eastern Europe, a single small colony of ladybird spiders also survive in a small patch of heathland near the Dorset town of Wareham in southern England. This species nests in cylindrical underground tubes, the entrances to which it covers with its silk webbing. Lunch consists of millipedes and beetles who try to cross the web and become stuck.

Answer: Pirate Spiders

Comprising some 200-odd species in total, the 'Mimetus' and 'Ero' are the best-known of the twelve genera that make up the 'Mimetidae' family, commonly called pirate spiders because of their preference for eating other spider species. These pirates do not weave webs but, instead, pluck the strands of other spiders' webs to mimic prey. Instead, when the owner of the web investigates, he becomes the prey.

Scientists are still unclear exactly how most species of pirate spiders manage to mate without becoming the victims of their potential mates. It has, though, been noted that males in many of these species possess extraordinary large appendages (relative to their size, of course), so perhaps they are able to mate without getting so close to each other that they become lunch.

Answer: Widow Spiders

This genus of spiders is widely known as widow spiders due to their practise of sexual cannibalism, whereby the female is known to eat the male after mating. Female widows are generally black with a red/orange hourglass on the underside of the abdomen.

The best-known species within this genus are: 'Latrodectus mactans', the black widow or southern black widow, native to warmer regions of North America; 'Latrodectus variolus', the northern black widow, found mostly in southern Canada and the northern USA; and 'Latrodectus hesperus', the western black widow, endemic to the western states of the USA.

Answer: Wandering Spiders

Also sometimes called tropical wolf spiders, wandering spiders are both aggressive and highly venomous, although there is an effective antivenom and so few bites from them prove fatal. 'Guinness World Records' named the Brazilian wandering spider as the most venomous spider in the world: the genus name, Phoneutria, means "murderess" in Ancient Greek.

The species in this group are called wandering spiders as they do not sit in a lair or web waiting for prey to come to them but, rather, wander the forest floor seeking victims under cover of darkness. Their favoured lunch includes crickets, katydids, mantids, as well as larger animals such as tree frogs or lizards.

The venom of a Brazilian wandering spider has been tested against that of a black widow by seeing how much of each is needed to kill a mouse: the wandering spider's venom was found to be almost 20 times more lethal than the widow's in this context.

Answer: Huntsman spiders

The pictured species is the green huntsman spider ('Micrommata virescens'). This species does not build a web but, instead, hunts down its insect prey in green vegetation, a task for which it is obviously ideally camouflaged.

The large family of species known collectively as huntsman spiders are called rain spiders or lizard-eating spiders in Africa. Some of the larger members of the family are also called wood spiders because of their preferred habitat. Huntsman spiders can be found worldwide with the exception of particularly cold regions.

Answer: Crab Spiders

Another family of spiders that do not use a web to catch their prey, crab spiders mostly employ ambush hunting methods for procuring food. Just to confuse laymen like me, though, wall crab spiders, giant crab spiders, philodromid crab spiders and six-eyed crab spiders are all unrelated and belong to entirely different families.

'Misumena vatia' is one of the few spider species that is capable of changing colour so that they can blend into the flowers in which they are hunting. This is not, however, an immediate process: going from white to yellow or vice versa takes a couple of days.