Leslie Brunetta

…is now available here. It was great fun talking with host Desiree Schell. The episode begins with an interesting conversation with Ed Yong about recent research resulting in hybrid spider-silkworm silk.

Walter Piorkowski has some amazing--and surprisingly beautiful--photomicrographic images of spider spinnerets at Photomacrography.net here and here and here. Walt, if you happen to see this, please let us know what species you were looking at and anything else you would like us to know--I'm not having much luck trying to contact you. Thanks for this unusual look at the external features of the silk system.

I'll be interviewed tomorrow night, Sunday January 8th, 6PM Mountain Time, on Skeptically Speaking. Please click on the link for details and instructions on how to submit questions. Should be fun!

If you don't already follow Ed Yong's great Not Exactly Rocket Science, you've been missing some of the best science blogging around. Check out his latest post, on research involving the insertion of spider silk genes into the genome of silkworms. These silkworms produced silk that's an improvement (in human terms; silkworm silk works just fine for silkworms) over normal silkworm silk, but not really up to spider dragline silk standards. There are all sorts of possible reasons for this result; I give some of them in the comments section below the post.

Silk was one of the first fibrous proteins to be investigated in the early 20th century. Spider silk's exceptional properties have long inspired researchers from fields ranging from mechanical engineering to biotech. Now three MIT researchers from the Departments of Mathematics and Civil and Environmental Engineering have used a new concept called ontology logs, from the category theory branch of mathematics, to examine the relationship between spider silk's structure and function.

The really different aspect of this research? They conducted their examination by comparing spider silk and classical music. And they present their findings as a demonstration of a new way of gaining insight into various structures built on smaller and smaller substructures. Read more at MITnews.

The original paper, by Tristan Giesa, David I. Spivak, and Markus J. Buehler, is published in BioNanoScience.

Shichang Zhang and colleagues have found that at least one orb weaver, Nephila antipodiana, deposits a substance on its web threads that deters ants. Ants prey on spiders, but ants have not often been seen preying on orb weaving spiders. Zhang et al. may have discovered why.

Alex Wild, over at Myrmecos, has a good summary of the study as well as an interesting quibble about the range of ants tested.

Virginia Prescott of New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth program had some great questions about spiders and spider silk this Halloween. You can listen in here.

We're very pleased that the National Center for Science Education has chosen to make a free excerpt of Spider Silk available. The NCSE defends the teaching of evolution in US public school science classrooms. We hope you enjoy this taste of the book.

Three papers published this summer might at first seem unrelated. But read together, they pull the entire arc of spider silk evolution into sharper focus. Two papers indirectly address the evolutionary origins of spider silk production. The other demonstrates that the evolution of silk proteins has been central to spider evolution even after the extraordinary proliferation of silks that made the vertical orb web possible.

First, F. Claire Rind and colleagues reported that at least some tarantulas (which belong to the family Theraphosidae) do indeed secrete silk from their feet. This report appears to settle a controversy that first broke out in 2006, when a team of researchers led by Stanislav Gorb announced that they had persuaded a Costa Rica zebra tarantula, Aphonopelma seemanni, to walk on a nearly vertical surface covered with glass microscope slides. The researchers claimed that as the tarantula started to slip, it left behind “footprints” made up of miniscule silk fibers. If this observation held true, it could have important implications concerning the origin of spider silk production. Like all spiders, tarantulas secrete silk through abdominal spinnerets, small appendages ending in multiple spigots that are the outlets for the abdominal silk glands. Genetic studies have shown that spider spinnerets are the evolutionary descendants of the gill branches of ancient arthropod limbs. If spiders secreted silk from their limbs as well as through their spinnerets, this fact might not only cement the limb-spinneret connection but also suggest new hypotheses for the earliest origins and survival value of spider silk.

The Gorb report left some questions open, however. (more…)

Congratulations to Boris Leroy, of the Universite de Rennes! Boris won the Student Distinction Award at the 26th European Congress of Arachnology, and his prize was a copy of Spider Silk, donated by Yale University Press. Written with Mauro Paschetta, Morgane Barbet-Massin, Nicolas Dubos, Alain Canard, and Frederic Ysnel, Boris’s presentation addressed “The future of threatened spiders in the face of climate change: insights with Dolomedes plantarius (Clerck).” Because individual spider species have adapted to particular humidity and temperature ranges, they may serve as excellent indicators of how global climate change will affect the future distribution of various species of other animals. Boris and his colleagues modelled present and future distributions of D. plantarius, an endangered fishing spider, explaining how various models are constructed and how accurate they are likely to be.