Misty weather this morning illuminated this beautiful spider’s web right outside our kitchen window.
Apparently spiders’ webs have existed for at least 100 million years. When spiders first moved from the water to the land more than 300 million years ago they started making silk to protect their bodies and their eggs. Spiders gradually started using silk for hunting purposes, first as guidelines and signal lines, then as ground or bush webs, and eventually as the aerial webs that are familiar today. The one pictured is a spiral orb web.
“The spider is a clever spinner
who makes a web to catch its dinner.”
A friend has alerted me to NASA’s experiments with drugged spiders. http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm
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