It is always fun for me to see how scientists get inspired. A former coworker of mine was inspired to study bees after watching a beekeeper remove a colony of wild bees from her house in an old record player case.
Well now it seems that a child's toy magic wand has inspired one scientist to look a little closer at the spider webs and how they work. This research will make spiders even cooler than they already are.
Most people don't realize that spider webs are a very time consuming process and that every day most spiders consume their webs and then respin them all over again. After all you can't catch a tiny gnat for lunch if there is a hole in your web large enough for it to fly through. Since these webs take a lot of time and resources to build spiders want to protect them from possible damage. Our human eyes sadly do not allow us to see spider webs really well unless the sunlight is hitting it at just the right angle, but to birds these webs stick out like giant neon signs warning them to pull up, go around, get out of the way! Some spiders also create doorbells, a strand of silk between one of the spider's legs and the web, so they don't always have to sit in the center. As soon as the web starts moving doorbell rings and the spider darts onto the web and grabs hold of it's prey before holes get ripped in the web.
Did you ever wonder how a spider can walk across a web and not get stuck but a fly gets stuck like super glue? The secret is they have a coating on the hairs and their feet which creates a nonstick surface also by walking slowly across the web they have much less of a chance of getting stuck to it as they spin their webs and as they catch their prey. As a spider moves across their webs they are using their many eyes to keep track of shadows and movement near by. While a spider can have anywhere from no eyes (cave dwelling spiders) to eight eyes they don't see very well and can mainly make out shadows and movement not what it is that is causing it.
Spiders are oh so cool.
