Poetry is a
Carl Sandburg
fresh morning spider-web
telling a story
of moonlit hours of
weaving and waiting
during a night.
Love or hate them, arachnids play a vital role in controlling pests in the organic garden. Are you aware that Arachnologists have calculated that spiders eat more than 400 million tons of insects yearly? Impressive!
There are spiders with the ability to capture insects in flight, while crawling on the ground, burrowing underground, or climbing trees. Wherever an insect goes, there’s a spider to capture it. Spiders creep in all habitats, including amongst the rocks in the intertidal zone of the Sydney Harbour foreshore. Day or night, spiders hunt.
Even though all spiders can spin silk, not all spiders create webs. Some spiders ambush prey, while others follow and jump their meal. Did you know there are pirate spiders? They invade another spider’s web and mimic the vibrations of a trapped insect to draw out and attack the web owner. Spiders use trickery to capture insects as well.
But we want to know how spiders make webs to capture prey in flight. Spiders have spinnerets on the underside of their abdomen. This is the silk spinning factory. The number of spinnerets differs per species. Each spinneret has a cluster of spigots that looks like an icing nozzle. A single silk thread comes out of each spout. The silk is pulled out by the spider’s hind leg or through gravity. Spider silk can be sticky, fluffy, or plain. Sticky spider silk has little droplets of glue attached to it.
Silk is liquid when inside the spider.
Fun Fact
A spider begins a web by throwing a few nonsticky silk threads into the wind. As the threads lengthen, the wind blows the threads onto an object where it is anchored. Once this bridge line is secure, the spider adds a few footholds before framing the web. Radi lines are added around the web from the middle, it looks like the spokes on a bicycle wheel. Once the framework is completed, the spider will use sticky silk to make the capture spiral. The threads are then tuned or pulled taut and the spider waits for prey.
Did you know that spider webs can leap out to trap an insect? This is because the spider silk is electronically conductive. As insects fly, they generate a static charge, and this attracts the silk to them.
A spiderweb is a thing you walk into
Unknown
which suddenly turns you into a karate master.
Can you believe that spider silk is stronger than steel? It has a stronger tensile strength than many types of steel. Dragline silk, which is the silk used to form the first bridge line in a web consists of proteins known as spidroin, alanine, and glycine. The proteins are made inside the spider’s silk glands and look like a thick paste before they are drawn out as fibers.
So what makes the silk strong? It’s the arrangement of millions of protein molecules that align tightly in a beta-sheet reinforced with crystalline regions that make it tough. If that was not enough, each silk strand is made up of thousands of nano strands working together to create a tensile strength that is astronomical.
God’s webspinners effortlessly create a wonder material humans have yet to replicate.
Table of Contents
Activities
Go, Spider Web Hunting. Take a camera!
Sketch a spider and its web in your nature journal. We included a web sample that we covered with contact paper.
Preserve a spider web on cardstock paper. Paint a spider next to it and frame your masterpiece.
Use a ball of yarn to create your spider web.
Observe spider silk through a microscope.
Create a playdough spider.
Websites to Visit
Spider Webs | The Australian Museum
Videos to Watch
Books to Read or Listen to:
Be Inspired to Create Masterpiece
