noun
definition
The fused head and thorax of spiders and crustaceans
Examples of cephalothorax in a Sentence
Growth is accompanied by a succession of moults, the spider emerging from its old skins by means of a fracture which extends along the front and sides of the cephalothorax just beneath the edge of the carapace.
The latter division, characterized by the possession of 19 somites and pairs of appendages (apart from the eyes), by the division of the appendages into two tagmata corresponding to cephalothorax and abdomen, and by the constancy in position of the generative apertures, differing in the two sexes, is unquestionably a natural group. The Entomostraca, however, are certainly a heterogeneous assemblage, defined only by negative characters, and the name is retained only for the sake of convenience, just as it is often useful to speak of a still more heterogeneous and unnatural assemblage of animals as Invertebrata.
Adult females are generally larger than the males with both adults having a large, rounded, flat cephalothorax.
In the majority of ant-imitating spiders the forepart of the cephalothorax is constricted on each side to resemble the neck of the insect, and in many cases the similarity is increased by the presence of a stripe of white hairs which has the optical effect of cutting out an extra piece of integument, exactly as occurs in analogous cases in insects.
Narrowing of the posterior portions of the spider's cephalothorax and sometimes of the anterior end of the abdomen reproduces the slender waist of the ant, and frequently transverse bands of hairs represent the segmentation of this region in the insect.
C, carapace covering the cephalothorax.