Spider webbing

General Questions
#1

Seeing as how my apartment seems to be lacking a screen, it’s slowly becoming a home for all sorts of insects and arachnids. Earlier this evening, while making some dinner, I noticed a spider wandering along the door of the cabinet and not wanting it to drop into my pasta, blew a little burts of air on it to blow it away. However, instead of going away, it simply fell down a little and crawled back up its web to the cabinet again. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this and it made me wonder: Do spiders constantly trail a little bit of webbing behind them for these situations? That seems like an awful lot of webbing to be cranking out day to day. Even for as thin as the strand is, I can’t imagine the spinnerets (?) are that large either and it must take away from a decent part of the spider’s body mass to keep cranking the stuff out as it meanders about. Even if you knock one to the ground, if you wait for it to walk away a little and then drag your finger across its trail behind it, it usually gets dragged along implying that it is still making even more webbing. How much webbing is in one of these things at a time? Come to think of it, is there a more offical term for spider webbing than ‘spider webbing’?

“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”

#2

All of your guesses are right–which explains why all spiders that I am aware of are carnivores: they need all the protein they can get.

Spiders generally trail a drag-line that they anchor, periodically. Any event that causes them to be displaced can only displace them by a short distance. One modification to the drag-line is when a young spider lets it drift out on a breeze. When enough line has been played out, a breeze can actually pick it up and drag it along in the method of a kite. This is how young spiders leave their nesting area and disperse.

Tom~

#3

May I change lanes just a tad? Do you remember that piece on the spider(s) that was given LSD and the beautiful web that was produced? World Book encyclopedia? Your post just caused an…er…flashback.

#4

Check out
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/9894/spiders.html
For your druggie spiders

“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”

#5

I remember seeing a before/after lsd web in a psychology text book, and the after lsd web was a mess.

#6

I go out in the evenings and watch the garden spiders,the big yellow and black ones, make their big orbs,discs really but they are called orb weavers. In the mornings I go out and watch them eat it all up. Yep, these girls recycle. Not always every morning,but definatly when the web gets too tattered for repair.Ther is one that spins a web at least three feet across, one anchor line is over six feet long. In college I was taken to ‘spider cliff’ in Paloduro Canyon, at the head of a smaller arm of the canyon was a cliff slightly hollowed out by eons of falling water. 50 feet across 100 high 20 deep. It was a mass of black widow web. They don’t make a nice pretty web ,a small compact thing dense, irregular, and 3 dimensional millions of black widows. for their thickness spider silk is stronger than steel, some strands are a molecule thick, black widow silk is exceptionaly strong. The govt. used to raise them and use the silk as cross hairs in optical devices. As for those screwed up acid webs the might have been beautiful if you were on acid too but they were screwed up. What did they expect? Wonder how much those experiments cost?

#7

Yes! It Was a psych book. Did I have it reversed?

#8

That website is interesting. Does it mean that some evil villain could fuck up Peter Parker by slipping him coffee?

#9

You sure about that one? I always thought spiders only drained fluid from things. Kind of hard to eat webbing with a set of siphon-esque fang thingies (that’s the scientific term for them, by the way)

“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”