Fossilized arachnids made silk but not webs

Darkfrog submitted, created time 2 weeks 1 day (www.nature.com)

Now here's a randomly cool one. Modern spiders use silk for more than just those webs that we love to photograph with dew all over them. They also wrap prey, wrap eggs, line their burrows and cast the strands upward to catch the wind and travel.

Now, it's not clear exactly what these ancient proto-spiders used their silks for, but we can tell that they lack spinnerets, so they would not have had the fine control of today's spiders. Also unlike today's spiders, they had small, one-millimeter tails

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Bigger isn't always better for spider colonies

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 4 days (www.nature.com)

This study reveals how colonies of one spider species grow to an enormous size, and the surprising factors that ultimately limit their expansion. At first, researchers wondered why spiders bother living in groups at all. The amount of pray they catch per spider tends to drop as the webs get bigger and bigger. THere did turn out to be a pretty considerable advantage, however...

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Love can be seen in a different light

Sue Wu submitted, created time 8 months 4 days (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

For people, ultraviolet B (UVB) is an invisible, cancer-causing ray to be blocked with sunscreen and dark glasses, but for a species of jumping spider, the light sets a romantic mood.

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Doctor Finds Spider in Boy's Ear

claudia submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.livescience.com)

What began as a faint popping in a 9-year-old boy's ear - "like Rice Krispies'' - ended up as an earache, and the doctor's diagnosis was that a pair of spiders made a home in the ear.

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spiders like to leave the lights on

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (www.sciam.com)

Interesting. I was just reading Amanda's post about the troglobites -- spider-like cave animals that die when exposed to UV light -- and then I came across this. When humans are deprived of sunlight, we lose vitamin D and the calcium that it lets us absorb. It seems that spiders have a reaction to UV deprivation too ...though I wouldn't call it similar.

Celibacy or rickets? Decisions, decisions...

This ties in with Amanda's post.
(http://www.discover8.com/article/Tiny_blind_animal_halts_billion_dollar_Aussie_mine_0)

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Spiders: Chastity belts stop cuckoos in the nest

newsdigg submitted, created time 1 year 10 months (www.physorg.com)

This news tell you something about male and female spiders, the female’s plugging mechanism. Very interesting! And this report on this amazing mechanism in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

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