The Spider Web That Gets Stronger When It Touches Insects
Its threads reinforce themselves by sucking up chemicals from the victim’s own shell.
What happens when an insect touches a spider’s web?
Most web-spinning spiders line their silken threads with droplets of glue, which snag blundering insects. But one group—the cribellate spiders—does something different. Their threads are surrounded by clouds of even more silk—extremely fine filaments, each a hundred times thinner than regular spider silk. These nanofibers give the silk a fuzzy, woolly texture, and since they have no glue, they’re completely dry. And yet they’re clearly
