As architectural as a spider

There are a lot of things in this world, which can be interesting for people who like to give a thought on these and are in search of inspiration. Set aside the universe, an almost infinite number of God’s creations exist in this world only. One such creation is Spider, which is one of the most fascinating creatures of this world, simply because of its uniqueness of actions and the way it’s designed.

Spider is called Araneae in scientific terms. There are around 38,834 species of this excellent creation categorized into 110 families. A few categories of spiders are Tarantulas, Hunting Spiders, biting spiders, jumping spiders & web-spinning spiders.

I’ll be focusing on the web spinners and the discussion spans across two parts. This part covers the web construction, the material and its quality, and the 2^nd part covers how they hunt their prey and how they defend themselves, which will be posted soon.

Silk & Web
The silk is made of protein, which does not decompose by fungi and bacteria like all other proteins. The reason is that this silk contains three substances that are important for its durability: Pyrolidin, Potassium Hydrogen Phosphate and Potassium Nitrate. We conserve protein by cooking, salting, drying or adding acid so that it remains intact.

The construction of web is one of the most sophisticated natural mechanisms that exist in this world. Although all spiders produce silk but only certain types of spiders build webs. The style of web varies from one species to another. Interestingly, there’s also a connection between eyesight & web construction capabilities of different spiders, which will be discussed in the next part.

This is the internal process, which goes through in a spider while producing silk:

• Spiders have ducts for producing liquid silk, which solidifies on contact with outside air.
• The secretion is drawn into fine threads by structures called spinnerets on the lower side of spider’s abdomen. The spinnerets, which spin the silk, work like the fingers of a hand. A spider can stretch out each spinneret, pull it back in, and even squeeze them all together.

This is the everlastingly interesting high-level view of how the construction is done:

• The most difficult part seems to be the first thread, for which the spider releases a sticky thread that is blown away with the wind, of course if she’s lucky. Simple!
• If the breeze carries the silken line to a spot where it sticks, the first bridge is formed.
• The spider cautiously crosses along the thin line, reinforcing it with a second line.
• She enforces the line until it is strong enough.
• After this she hangs a thread in the form of a Y below the primary thread.
• These are the first three radial of the web. More radials are constructed taking care that the distance between the radial is small enough to cross.
• Then the adhesive spiral thread is placed and the web is ready to be used.

Re-engineering the Web
After a night of hunting the web becomes worn out (destroyed by bad weather and by the flying prey). The spider removes the silk in the morning only leaving the first bridge line. After daytime’s rest the spider constructs a new web in the evening. If the catch was low and the web is not heavily damaged the web may stay during the day and be reused after minor repairing.

A lot of orb weaving spiders even recycle their webs. The weaving of a web takes up a lot of the spider's resources. Since they need to renew their web regularly, they eat the silk. Only the main thread of the web is left intact. The cutting and the digesting of the web are done by special digestive juices that contain enzymes rather than by any mechanical cutting. These juices are also used to connect the strands of silk together. They usually weave a new web in the morning.

Material & Quality of Silk
Some spiders comb their silk to a wooly structure. To do this they have a comb like structure near the fourth legs and an extra silk producing organ just in front of the spinners, which appears as a transparent plate. There is no glue on the threads but the insect gets stuck with the hairs on their body in the silk. The thicker threads in the silk prevent the insect from tearing the silk.

Quite interestingly, the quality of the silk which she produces is an extremely strong material and is on weight basis, stronger than steel. This thread is not only strong but also very elastic. The thread of one of the orb web spider type is very elastic and can be stretched 30 - 40% before it breaks. Steel can be stretched only 8% and nylon around 20%. It has been suggested that a pencil thick strand of silk could stop a Boeing 747 in flight at full speed. Amazing! According to a study, we are still unable to reproduce such a material with all our technological know-how.

Applications of Spider Silk
The silk is utilized by the spider for a lot of different uses, which include constructing their webs, the production of egg sacs, wrapping in their prey, as a life line when jumping (just like spider-man), or dropping to escape, for transferring semen from the abdomen to the male palp, as a shelter in which it can retreat, etc. This silk has been utilized by humans as well e.g. for producing fishing lines, nets for the transportation of arrow points, tobacco and dried poison for the arrow points, cross hair in instruments, etc.

With this, I would like to add another perspective to all this information, that all this is done by a single spider and even much more. A normal human being with some intelligence can easily comprehend what type of intelligence is needed to come up with a design of such level. It’s even hard for a human being to come up with such a perfect design. Hence obviously a spider hasn’t invented itself or induced these capabilities with evolution. It’s simply the perfection of God; the perfect working system advocates that, an inch here and there in a spider can really mess things up.