Latest Spider anatomy Stories

Researchers have discovered a male spider in the Judean foothills of Israel with an evolutionarily effective yet sadistic sexual perversion.For most spiders, the mating ritual involves the male ejecting sperm into the female's vulva, where it is stored it in a pouch called the spermatheca. These receptacles give the female control of when her eggs will be fertilized, by moving sperm onto them before she lays. The spermatheca is a "last in, first out" structure which means that the last male...

Scientists have strengthened spider silk three times more than its natural durability - which is already tougher and lighter than steel - by infusing the silk with small bits of metal, Reuters reported.This procedure may prove beneficial for developing extremely durable textiles as well as high-tech medical materials like artificial bones and tendons.Researcher Seung-Mo Lee of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany suggested the infused spider silk "could make...

Atlas of Scanning Electron Microscope Images of the Book Lung Published by the American Museum of Natural HistoryModern microscopy technology has allowed two scorpion biologists, Carsten Kamenz of the Humboldt University in Berlin and Lorenzo Prendini of the American Museum of Natural History, to study and document what is nearly invisible. Looking at tiny morphological features like the sculpting of the hair-like outgrowths on lamellae"”structures that fold like the leaves of a book and...

A researcher at the University of Kansas has discovered a link between ancient spiders and their modern relatives. Scientists have often debated about the origin of the silk spiders use to spin webs, said Paul Selden, director of the Paleontological Institute at the Biodiversity Institute and professor of invertebrate paleontology at Kansas University.Selden discovered that what researchers had previously considered to have been web-spinning appendages located on the fossilized remains of...

An Oxford University researcher reported Monday the discovery of the world's oldest spider web.  An amateur fossil-hunter searching the beaches of England's south coast discovered the web's tiny twisted threads encased in an ancient piece of amber, or fossilized tree resin, nearly two years ago.Paleobiologist Martin Brasier said the 140-million-year-old web is proof that arachnids have been around since the time of the dinosaur.He noted that the threads were linked to each other in the...

A German team of engineers reported developing a device that borrows silk-spinning techniques from spiders to create strong strands with potential uses for lightweight medical equipment materials.The team said their work shed light on how spiders produce their rugged webs."We can observe the initial steps of fiber formation, which was not possible before," said Sebastian Rammensee of the Technical University of Munich and one of the authors of the Proceedings of the National Academy...

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Spain and Croatia led an investigation into the peculiar lifestyle of numerous spider species, which live, feed, breed and "˜walk' in an upside-down hanging position. According to their results, such "˜unconventional' enterprise drives a shape in spiders that confers high energy efficiency, as in oscillatory pendulums. These results will appear in this week's issue of PLoS ONE. The great majority of land animals evolved to use the ground as the...

Q . I believe I am having a spider mite invasion. Plants and trees affected have spider webs throughout them. Leaves are brown on the ends and dying fast. I have seen little tiny spiders on some. On my flowering dogwoods, planted this year, I found a small green worm. As an amateur gardener, I am becoming increasingly frustrated and disillusioned. - Sharon, Chesapeake A. Spider mites hate high humidity and rainfall, and we've had both this fall. Your letter was dated in late August so...

WILLS POINT, Texas - Entomologists are debating the origin and rarity of a sprawling spider web that blankets several trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard stretch of trail in a North Texas park. Officials at Lake Tawakoni State Park say the massive mosquito trap is a big attraction for some visitors, while others won't go anywhere near it. "At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland," said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles east of Dallas....

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.-- A team of MIT engineers has identified two key physical processes that lend spider silk its unrivaled strength and durability, bringing closer to reality the long-sought goal of spinning artificial spider silk.Manufactured spider silk could be used for artificial tendons and ligaments, sutures, parachutes and bulletproof vests. But engineers have not managed to do what spiders do effortlessly.In a study published in the November issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology,...