After reading vignettes, a group of spider-phobic girls (n = 18) and a group of nonphobic girls (n = 18) rated the subjective probability of spiders entering their private living space, their tendency to approach and make physical contact, and the subjective probability of spiders doing physical harm. In addition, they indicated their eagerness to eat a favorite food item before as well as afte...

Molecular spiders are synthetic bio-molecular systems which have "legs" made of short single-stranded segments of DNA. Spiders move on a surface covered with single-stranded DNA segments complementary to legs. Different mappings are established between various models of spiders and simple exclusion processes. For spiders with simple gait and varying number of legs we compute the diffusion coeff...

Spider silk is a high-performance biomaterial with exceptional mechanical properties and over half a century of research into its mechanics, structure, and biology. Recent research demonstrates that it is a highly variable class of materials that differs across species and individuals in complex and interesting ways. Here, we review recent literature on mechanical variation and evolution in spi...

Australian crab spiders Thomisus spectabilis ambush pollinating insects, such as honeybees (Apis mellifera) on flowers, and can change their body colour between yellow and white. It is traditionally assumed that the spiders change their colour to match the flower colour, thus rendering them cryptic to insect prey. Here, we test this assumption combining state-of-the-art knowledge of bee vision ...

Colonial orb-weaving spiders provide insight into the proximate mechanisms by which social animals space themselves within a group. We examined mechanisms for the temporal patterns of web building that determine individual positions in Metepeira incrassata (Araneidae) colonies. The spiders display a characteristic age-related sequence of daily web building, with larger spiders completing their ...

Eggs of black widow spiders in the genus Latrodectus Walckenaer, 1805 (Theridiidae) are known to be toxic when injected into mammals. We surveyed eggs from 39 species of spiders in 21 families to determine if spider egg toxicity is a unique property of widow spiders, or if spider egg toxicity is associated with other spider taxa. Eggs from 13 species of spiders in three families were determined...

In 1987, the hobo spider, Tegenaria agrestis, was initially implicated in necrotic lesions in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. This European-origin species has since joined the widow and recluse spiders to become the well-known trio of medically significant spiders in North America. It is currently distributed from British Columbia to Oregon and east to Montana and Colorado, with eas...

Spiders represent an ancient predatory lineage known for their extraordinary biomaterials, including venoms and silks. These adaptations make spiders key arthropod predators in most terrestrial ecosystems. Despite ecological, biomedical, and biomaterial importance, relationships among major spider lineages remain unresolved or poorly supported. Current working hypotheses for a spider "backbone"...

BACKGROUND Animals have been hypothesized to benefit from pendulum mechanics during suspensory locomotion, in which the potential energy of gravity is converted into kinetic energy according to the energy-conservation principle. However, no convincing evidence has been found so far. Demonstrating that morphological evolution follows pendulum mechanics is important from a biomechanical point of ...

Spiders of the tropical American colonial orb weaver Parawixia bistriata form a communal bivouac in daytime. At sunset, they leave the bivouac and construct individual, defended webs within a large, communally built scaffolding of permanent, thick silk lines between trees and bushes. Once spiders started building a web, they repelled other spiders walking on nearby scaffolding with a "bounce" b...