This is the dragline spun by scytodes, the spitting spider.

They hatch adders' eggs, and weave the spider's web he who eats of their eggs dies and that which is crushed breaks out into a viper.

They hatch adders' eggs, and weave the spider's web he who eats of their eggs dies and that which is crushed breaks out into a viper.

They hatch cockatrice' eggs, and weave the spider's web he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper.

They hatch cockatrice' eggs, and weave the spider's web he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper.

Most spiders use copious amounts of silk, and silk is essential to their survival and reproduction.

Some of them are orb weaving spiders and some of them are non orb weaving spiders.

These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider.

For example, this garden spider can make seven different kinds of silks.

So this means that both spiders and spider silk have been around for 380 million years.

It doesn't take long from working with spiders to start noticing how essential silk is to just about every aspect of their life.

So silk comes out of the spinnerets, and for those of us spider silk biologists, this is what we call the business end of the spider.

Spider

The Spider of Finance

I'm afraid of spiders.

How does an individual spider make so many kinds of silk?

To borrow from the writings of a spider named Charlotte, silk is terrific.

But how about variation among spider species, so looking at one type of silk and looking at different species of spiders?

Tom hates spiders.

I'm really scared of spiders.

When you look at this orb web, you're actually seeing many types of silk fibers.

This is a picture of the spinnerets coming out of a spider and the silk being formed from a spider. Isn't that beautiful?

It's been hypothesized that orb weaving spiders, like this argiope here, should have the toughest dragline silks because they must intercept flying prey.

Cheryl Hayashi The magnificence of spider silk

There are many kinds of spider silk.

Spider Three Decks

Spiderette

Penguin Spider

Spiders like to build spiderwebs.

I used a money spider's web to actually attach certain things, which sent me insane.

Spiders are also extremely old.

Pyriform silk glands make the attachment cement that's the silk that's used to adhere silk lines to a substrate.

Scytodes doesn't use a web at all to catch prey. Instead, scytodes sort of lurks around and waits for prey to get close to it, and then immobilizes prey by spraying a silk like venom onto that insect.

I'm a starved spider.

There's a spider in the box.

The frame and radii of this web is made up of one type of silk, while the capture spiral is a composite of two different silks the filament and the sticky droplet.

If you look right here at the two red arrows, they point to the toughness values for the draglines of nephila clavipes and araneus diadematus.

And the spider's web is for the reins on the horse.

She shrieked whenever she saw a spider.

In addition to these biomimetic applications of spider silks, personally, I find studying spider silks just fascinating in and of itself.

There are over 40,000 described species of spiders.

He's like an underwater Spiderman.

Even fossil spiders can make silk, as we can see from this impression of a spinneret on this fossil spider.

If it wasn't able to stretch so much, then basically when an insect hit the web, it would just trampoline right off of it.

It's like the spiders are sharing an ancient secret with me, and that's why I'm going to spend the rest of my life studying spider silk.