Chula Vista

Question for the spider lovers. Sometimes I see a large web that's woven up high between two trees that are a pretty good distance apart. How the heck does the spider run the first strand from one tree to the other?

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

The Batlord

Well I've only seen the two a few months ago, and haven't seen any since, so I'm hoping for the best while falling back on laziness.

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Lord Larehip

Nice wallpaper image

Lord Larehip

Lycosa family portrait.

Lord Larehip

Arachnophobes, look away now.

For scientists have discovered some of world's biggest and strongest spider webs spanning over a river in Madagascar.

Created by Darwin's bark spider, a newly identified species, the giant webs are made of the world's strongest known biological material.

Shown here in these pictures the orbs are the world's largest webs of any single spider, according to new studies.<snip>

World's biggest spider web stretches more than 80 feet across river | Daily Mail Online

DwnWthVwls

I've heard they lower themselves on their silk and allow the wind to blow them across large gaps. Idk if all species follow this model or how true it even is. I'll have to go look that up.

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...

Chula Vista

That works.

As long as "They can fly" stays out of the conversation, I'm good.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Lord Larehip

Actually, it's a mystery. In the article I posted, they speculated that spiders swing on a thread Tarzan-style and just let the silk pay out until they land on something. They now know this is not how it's done. Quite simply, they do not know how. As I said, they are quite intelligent.

How do they build a web in the first place? Then there are these little desert spiders that live in little cubby holes on the desert floor. The floor is littered with little crystals and the winds blow sand across the floor on a continuous basis. So the spiders can't build webs to catch bugs so instead they gather the crystals and group them around the hole in a ring so that all the crystals in the ring touch an adjacent crystal. They attach a silk thread to one crystal, loop down into the hole and then attach the other end of the thread to a crystal on the opposite side of the hole from the other crystal. Then the spider gets on the silk loop and sits there motionless like a man on a trapeze. When a bug walks by, its movements create tiny vibrations that the crystals pick up and they too vibrate which causes the thread to vibrate which the spider can then feel. Based on the vibration, the spider knows if it is a bug or a larger creature or just the wind. It knows where the bug is outside the hole and how far from the hole it is. Then it jumps out and pounces on the bug lightning quick and never misses. How could a spider know how to do that?

Chula Vista

I think the bigger question is: How do you know all this stuff?

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

CoNtrivedNiHilism

Yeah, Batlord. Those things won't turn you in to Spiderman when the bite you. They turn you in to Oh **** I'm Dead Man.