Nov 212011
This week’s pic is one I snapped on a highland holiday – she’s a native resident of Lochcarron, although you can find plenty of her fellow garden spiders in, you guessed it, gardens all over Europe and North America. She’s also known as a cross orbweaver, diadem spider or – to you and me - Araneus diadematus.
Common they may be, but these ladies (the gents are smaller and don’t spin webs) are pretty impressive engineers. The first, anchoring thread of one of these webs is usually laid by crawling down from the starting point, across the intervening countryside (or in this case, windowsill) and then up to a useful second anchor-point. Then she’ll munch down on the thread she’s trailed behind her until it’s pulled tight. In fact, these entire webs can be ingested so that the useful ingredients are recycled for the next fly-catching masterpiece – and no wonder! Spider silk, famously, has tensile strength in the same ballpark as steel.
For more garden spider goss, check out this clip from the BBC. And remember that classic, rather sobering study of web-spinning under the influence of drugs? If not, here’s a reminder:
And a spoof:
by jonathan
ah that’s rad – I always wondered how spiders laid their first thread
that vid’s a classic