Spiders use a unique type of aerial dispersal called “ballooning” to move from one location to another. In order to balloon, a spider must first release one or more flexible, elastic, silk draglines from its spinnerets. Once enough force is generated on the dragline(s), the spider becomes airborne. This “take-off” stage of ballooning is followed by the “flight” stage and finally the “settling” ...

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a subset of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and both use very similar chemistry. Recently, it has been reported that ALD has the potential to realize a new design paradigm of bioinorganic materials through metal infiltration, which in nature has been employed as a hardening strategy for many tissues in diverse biological organisms. Herein, using a spider draglin...

β-Sheet crystals play an important role in determining the stiffness, strength, and optical properties of silk and in the exhibition of silk-type-specific functions. It is important to elucidate the structural changes that occur during the stretching of silk fibres to understand the functions of different types of fibres. Herein, we elucidate the initial crystallisation behaviour of silk molecu...

In the early stages of their life, solitary spiders undergo a transient gregarious phase. We designed a series of experiments in which collective displacements were induced in groups of spiderlings of the solitary species Larinioides cornutus (Araneae: Araneidae). Spiderlings were given access to a bifurcated escape route (Y-choice set-up) from a container. Consecutive passages in the set-up le...

Major ampullate (MA) dragline silk supports spider orb webs, combining strength and extensibility in the toughest biomaterial. MA silk evolved ~376 MYA and identifying how evolutionary changes in proteins influenced silk mechanics is crucial for biomimetics, but is hindered by high spinning plasticity. We use supercontraction to remove that variation and characterize MA silk across the spider p...

This data article includes size exclusion chromatography data of soluble eADF4(C16), an engineered spider silk variant based on the core domain sequence of the natural dragline silk protein ADF4 of Araneus diadematus, in combination with light scattering; the protein is monomeric before assembly. The assembled mature fibrils were visualized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic f...

doi 10.1002/gea.21433 In the summer of 1960, mammoth bones were discovered by a dragline operator in southern Wyoming at the Union Pacific (U.P.) Mammoth site. Although subsequent archaeological work during 1960 and 1961 identified artifacts in association with the mammoth remains, many authors have since questioned the nature of that association. Also, little has been published about the site ...

Synchrotron FTIR (S-FTIR) microspectroscopy was used to monitor the silk protein conformation in a range of single natural silk fibers (domestic and wild silkworm and spider dragline silk). With the selection of suitable aperture size, we obtained high-resolution S-FTIR spectra capable of semiquantitative analysis of protein secondary structures. For the first time, we have determined from S-FT...