The quiet, solitary and patient spider uses electromagnetism for more effective trapping. It may not be cute and cuddly but it is an extremely efficient engineer and predator, worthy of our admiration.
THE ATLANTIC - Their silks are similar in tensile strength to alloy steel. Their adhesive properties adjust to movements of prey ensnared in them. Yet they are, for many of the spiders that weave them, edible.
New research suggests that webs and positively charged objects - like insects flying by - seem to be electrically attracted to each other. The flapping of insects' wings generate an electric charge. Honeybees can generate up to 200 volts of electricity to detach pollen from flowers.
The study, conducted by U.C. Berkeley's Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez and Robert Dudley and published in the journal Scientific Reports tested webs' responsiveness to, in particular, the electrostatic charges of insects and water droplets.
The webs and positively charged objects did indeed seem to be attracted to each other. The silk threads in the web, for example, curved toward each other underneath a charged honeybee that was falling toward it - which would make it likelier that the bee would become entangled in the web.
Video sequences, both of positively charged insects and of water droplets falling towards a web, revealed rapid and substantial web attraction. Radial and especially spiral silk threads, the authors write, "are quickly attracted to the electrified bodies. By contrast, control trials using uncharged insects and water drops showed no such deformation. And the deformations they're describing were significant: they were, on average, nearly half the length of the insects themselves.
Experiments show clearly that positively charged insect bodies induce rapid attraction of silk thread in the webs of cross-spiders.
Read more and see pictures here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/confirmed-spiders-are-even-more-terrifying-than-previously-thought/277544/?google_editors_picks=true
And here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2357851/Spider-webs-attract-insects-pulling-using-electric-charge-created-flapping-wings.html
Link to this post - http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2013/07/spiders-use-electromagnetism-to-catch.html And here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2357851/Spider-webs-attract-insects-pulling-using-electric-charge-created-flapping-wings.html
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