Physical Description
The female redback has a round body about the size of a large pea (1 cm long), with long, slender legs. The body is a deep black colour (occasionally brownish), often containing an obvious orange to red longitudinal stripe on the upper abdomen. The stripe is sometimes broken or looks like small red dots. On the underside of the abdomen is an "hourglass"-shaped red/orange spot. Juvenile spiders have additional white markings on the abdomen. The male redback is three to four millimetres long and is light brown in colour, with white markings on the upper side of the abdomen and a pale hourglass marking on the underside.
Read more about this topic: Redback Spider
Famous quotes containing the words physical and/or description:
“It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.”
—Freda Adler (b. 1934)