A new Nephila, the biggest so far!

A new and rare species of “giant” orb web spider has been discovered in Africa and Madagascar. In the journal Plos One, researchers describe Nephila komaci as the largest web spinning spider known to science. Only the females of this groups of species are giants, with a leg span of up to 12cm (4.7in); the male spiders are tiny by comparison. Scientists say the female spiders are capable of spinning webs that reach up to 1m (3ft 3in) in diameter.

A Vegetarian spider!!!

“Around 40 or 50 spider species have been documented drinking nectar, but this is the first case where a spider has been shown to survive on plant matter,” says Ken Whitney of Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Christopher Meehan at the University of Arizona in Tucson and colleagues conducted stable-isotope analyses of the spider's body tissue. 15N:14N ratios betray diet type – with low ratios suggesting a vegetarian – while 13C:12C ratios can be used to identify the source of a creature's food.

via Vegetarian spider is Gandhi of arachnids – life – 12 October 2009 – New Scientist.

1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today

Link

Shadow competition paper is out!

Experimental Evidence for the Amelioration of Shadow Competition in an Orb-Web Spider Through the ‘Ricochet’ Effect
Dinesh Rao
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, North Ryde, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Abstract
Stationary predators such as spiders can face competition from conspecifics simply by virtue of the spatial positioning of their webs. Shadow competition, wherein a predator ‘upstream’ restricts access to prey for another individual further ‘downstream’, can affect the foraging success of stationary predators. However, in spiders that build orb-webs in proximity to each other, insect prey often ‘ricochet’ off the outer web and land on the inner web. In this study, I asked whether the negative effect of shadow competition could be compensated for by the ricochet effect. I experimentally show that despite a strong spatial advantage to a spider on the outer side in terms of prey interceptions, the likelihood of prey intercepting the inner web is increased through the ricochet effect. I also show that the degree of overlap between the webs significantly influences both the number of prey intercepted as well as the number of ricochets. This study shows experimentally that a spider that builds its web close to a conspecific’s web suffers very little cost in terms of lost prey interception.

For super-tough spider silk, just add titanium

SPIDER silk is already one of the toughest fibres known, and now it can be made even more resilient with an injection of metal. By infiltrating the protein structure of the silk, the metal makes each strand 10 times as hard to snap.

via New Scientist.