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

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

These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider.

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

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

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

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.

This is the comparison of the toughness of the dragline spilk spun by 21 species 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.

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

Like the spider who eats her mate when he is no longer a necessity?

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

We spend long days and nights staring at this part of the spider.

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

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

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.

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

Spider

You Spider!

It's a spider.

Spiders?

Spiders use silk for many purposes, including the trailing safety dragline, wrapping eggs for reproduction, protective retreats and catching prey.

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

Scytodes doesn't use a web at all to catch prey.

Spider

A cobweb.

All spiders make silk at some point in their life.

Inside each spider, there are hundreds of silk glands, sometimes thousands.

Silks made by the same spider can have dramatically different repeat sequences.

These are the two species of spiders for which the vast majority of time and money on synthetic spider silk research has been to replicate their dragline silk proteins.

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

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

There's quite a bit of variation within the fibers that an individual spider can make.

Spider

The Spider of Finance

I'm afraid of spiders.

To answer that, you have to look a lot closer at the spinneret region of a spider.

And what you can see is that nearly all the spider draglines surpass them.

To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk protein, it's just a portion of it, from the black widow spider.

Tom hates spiders.

I'm really scared of spiders.

I hate cobwebs.

Means spider !

There are two orders of magnitude more spiders than primates.