Source: The Guardian

On the web … Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Silk worms seem to have cornered a market. Is there any potential commercial use for spider's webs?

Dutch scientists have genetically engineered goats so that the milk they produce contains the proteins found in spider silk. The silk can then be spun from the milk (I absolutely promise I am not making this up), and woven into a fabric that can be blended with human skin to render it bulletproof. The bulletproof skin bit is still under development, but the spider-silk producing goats are real and alive.

GentDirly

In the 1960s I worked for a company making microscopes. We had staff who had worked for the Ross company making telescopes and rangefinders, and from the Vickers factory making all sorts of optical equipment. These people said that gossamer was used to make cross-hairs in the eyepieces of all their products. They also said the highlight of the apprentices' year was the annual spider hunt to collect the gossamer. They may have been pulling my leg – I'm sure your correspondents will let me know.

Simon Hurdley, Bridport, Dorset

Spiders' webs have been used in the past to seal wounds and burns – I don't know if they were any good for it, though.

derangedlemur

Source: The Verge

Spider that builds larger spider decoys discovered, may be a new species
By Kimber Streams on December 18, 2012

Biologist and science educator Phil Torres may have discovered a completely new species — a spider that builds detailed replicas of larger spiders to intimidate and confuse potential predators. The spider, currently thought to be a new member of the genus Cyclosa, uses small pieces of leaf, dead insects, and other debris to create fake spiders, complete with legs. Other Cyclosa create decoys using spare egg sacs, but this new spider's sculptures are the first to feature leg-like appendages. Speaking to Wired, Torres said that when he first saw one of the small, 5mm spiders and its decoy on a tour at Peru's Tambopata Research Center, "it blew my mind."

However, the spider is still a long way from being recognized as a new species. First, Torres must go back to the site in January to collect specimens to compare against other species. If this spider turns out to be biologically different than the known species of Cyclosa, then all the information will be published, verified, and Torres' discovery will be officially classified as a new spider species. This spider isn't a legitimate species just yet, but the one behind you probably is.

Source: Live Science

Spider silk can be scary enough to insects to act as a pest repellent, researchers say.

These findings could lead to a new way to naturally help protect crops, scientists added.

Spiders are among the most common predators on land. Although not all spiders weave webs, they all spin silk that may serve other purposes. For instance, many tiny spiders use silk balloons to travel by air.

Researchers suspected that insects and other regular prey of spiders might associate silk with the risk of getting eaten. As such, they reasoned silk might scare insects off.

The scientists experimented with Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica) and Mexican bean beetles (Epilachna varivestis). These plant-munching pests have spread across eastern North America within the past half-century. [Ewww! Nature's Biggest Pests]

The beetles were analyzed near green bean plants (Phaseolus vulgaris) in both the lab and a tilled field outdoors. The investigators applied two kinds of silk on the plants — one from silkworms (Bombyx mori) and another from a long-jawed spider (Tetragnatha elongata), a species common in riverbank forests but not in the region the researchers studied.

Both spider and silkworm silk reduced insect plant-chewing significantly. In the lab, both eliminated insect damage entirely, while in the field, spider silk had a greater effect — plants enclosed with beetles and spider silk experienced about 50 percent less damage than leaves without spider silk, while silkworm silk only led to about a 10 to 20 percent reduction. Experiments with other fibers revealed that only silk had this protective effect.

"This work suggests that silk alone is a signal to potential prey that danger is near," researcher Ann Rypstra, an evolutionary ecologist at Miami University in Hamilton, Ohio, told LiveScience.

Rypstra was most surprised that the effect occurred even though the species involved do not share any evolutionary history together as predator and prey. This suggests "herbivores are using the silk as some sort of general signal that a spider — any ol' spider — is around and responding by reducing their activity or leaving the area," she said.

While more work will need to be done before this research might find applied use, the fact that the presence of silk alone reduced damage caused by two economically important pest insects "suggests that there could be applications in agricultural pest management and biological control," Rypstra said.

Rypstra is also interested in the chain reaction of events that silk might trigger in an ecosystem.

"For example, if an herbivore encounters a strand of silk and alters its behavior in a particular manner, does that make it more susceptible to predation by a non-spider?" Rypstra asked. "Do spiders that leave lots of silk behind have a larger impact in the food web, and how does it vary from habitat to habitat? These are just a couple of questions that we might be exploring in the near future."

Rypstra and her colleagues detailed their findings online Nov. 28 in the journal Biology Letters.