Spider Silk: Thousands of Nano-Filaments and Dollops of Sticky Glue
نویسنده
چکیده
Some spiders use glues while others deploy strands of fine filaments for fixing flies. Recent work has provided new insights into the mechanical properties of these nano-scale ropes.
منابع مشابه
Quasistatic and continuous dynamic characterization of the mechanical properties of silk from the cobweb of the black widow spider Latrodectus hesperus.
Spider silks are among the strongest and toughest known materials, but investigation of these remarkable properties has been confined largely to orb-weaving spiders. We investigated the mechanical performance of silk from the cobweb-weaving spider Latrodectus hesperus. Both silk from the scaffolding region of the web and sticky gumfooted capture lines had material properties similar to the majo...
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Orb-weaving spiders produce webs using two types of silk that have radically different mechanical properties. The dragline silk used to construct the supporting frame and radii of the web is stiff and as strong as steel, while the capture spiral is much weaker but more than ten times as extensible. This remarkable divergence in mechanical properties has been attributed to the aqueous glue that ...
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Comparisons of webs spun in the field when both sticky and non-sticky silk supplies were complete, when both were recently depleted, and when only non-sticky supplies were depleted show that Leucauge mariana and Micrathena sexspinosa vary design features of their orbs such as numbers of radii and sticky spiral loops, web area and proportion covered with sticky spiral, sticky spiral symmetry, an...
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Most spider threads are on the micrometre and sub-micrometre scale. Yet, there are some spiders that spin true nano-scale fibres such as the cribellate orb spider, Uloborus plumipes. Here, we analyse the highly specialized capture silk-spinning system of this spider and compare it with the silk extrusion systems of the more standard spider dragline threads. The cribellar silk extrusion system c...
متن کاملAdhesion of dry and wet cribellate capture silk
We demonstrate the impressive adhesive qualities of Uloborid spider orbweb capture when dry, which are lost when the nano-filament threads are wetted. A force sensor with a 50 nN–1mN detection sensitively allowed us to measure quantitatively the stress–strain characteristics of native silk threads in both the original dry state and after wetting by controlled application of water mist with drop...
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Current Biology
دوره 16 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2006