A male orb-weaving spider catapults off a female after mating. Survival could mean another chance to fertilize her eggs. A male orb-weaving spider catapults off a female after mating. Survival could mean another chance to fertilize her eggs. Rudyard Kipling famously observed in a 1911 poem that “the female of the species is deadlier than […]
Enlarge / Image from a 2018 observational study of ballooning in large spiders depicting a crab spider just as it is about to take off. (credit: Cho, M. et al., 2018/CC BY-SA 4.0) In 1832, Charles Darwin witnessed hundreds of ballooning spiders landing on the HMS Beagle while some 60 miles offshore. Ballooning is a […]
Johns Hopkins University researchers discovered precisely how spiders build webs by using night vision and artificial intelligence to track and record every movement of all eight legs as spiders worked in the dark. Ovid’s Metamorphoses speaks of the orb-weavers, said to be descendants of Arachne, a figure in Greek mythology who wove beautiful tapestries and […]
Enlarge (credit: xbn83 / Getty Images) People tend to associate intelligence with brain size. And as a general guideline, this makes sense: more brain cells, more mental capabilities. Humans, and many of the other animals we’ve come to think of as unusually bright, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, all have large brains. And it’s long been […]
Enlarge / A new study found that ethyl acetate and other solvents typically used to study the antimicrobial properties of spider silk can inhibit bacterial growth. So prior studies finding such evidence may be methodologically flawed. (credit: Simon Fruergaard/CC BY-SA) Ancient Greeks and Romans are said to have treated wounds suffered in battle with poultices […]
Enlarge / A brown widow spider feeding on a Brahminy blindsnake in a garden house in Zaachila, Oaxaca, Mexico. (credit: Matias Martinez) What’s the spider with a discriminating palate to do when it gets tired of chowing down on its usual insect-heavy fare? A few nibbles of fresh snake might do the trick. Yes, some […]
Now you can walk through a virtual spider web, using VR headset and controllers to interact with a web sonification model. A spider weaving its intricate web is a bit like a person composing a song, at least in the eyes of MIT materials engineer Markus Buehler, whose research involves translating web structure into musical […]