#spidersilk — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #spidersilk, aggregated by home.social.
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Got some footage of a mesh-web weaver (family Dictynidae) back-combing her silk to make it fuzzy!
It doesn't just tangle up insects; several years ago research showed the silk melds with the waxy coating of some insect cuticles on the molecular level. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.0363 :OpenAccess:
#DailySpiderVid #SpidersOfMastodon #spiders #Dictynidae #cribellate #SpiderSilk
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#Arachtober 10: from back in June, a mesh-web weaver (family Dictynidae) back-combing a line of silk to turn it into a fuzz of nanofibres. Spiders like this have a special sieve-like silk-making organ called a cribellum. This in fact is the ancestral state of most spiders.
Cribellate silk doesn't use glue; rather, it melds with the waxy compounds on some insect exoskeletons. It doesn't stick very well to other surfaces. Later in spider evolution, spiders developed other types of silk that could catch different insects and support more ambitious aerial webs. However, for a minority of spiders, cribellate silk still works just fine.
More details in this 2017 paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.0363 :OpenAccess:
#DailySpiderVid #arachnids #spiders #Araneae #Dictynidae #SpiderSilk #SpiderBehaviour #OpenAccess