Why are wolf spiders so weak?

Question

We have hundreds of huge wolf spiders and only a very few tiny web building spiders in our house. They range from Cream spiders, daddy long legs, house spiders, grass spiders. The only meal I see that the web spiders are eating are the wolf spiders. I thought Wolf Spiders had excellent eyesight and are great hunters?

Answer 1

Wolf spiders have pretty good eyesight (for spiders) but that doesn't mean they can see webs. They're better at spotting movement, and use vibrations in the air and ground (and possibly scent) to help them locate prey. Web-building spiders are pretty good at what they do, which is to use the web's entangling properties to make up for the spider's relative weakness. Web-spinners generally have pretty effective venom that can quickly immobilize things that blunder into their webs, while wolf spiders tend to rely more on size and strength to overpower their prey. A web-spinner out of its web would be easy pickings for a wolf spider, but it's the other way around, as you have seen, when the wandering hunter gets enmeshed in a web. The web-spinner can dash in, bite the confused intruding spider and then dodge out of the way and let the venom do its work.