Jeanie Mathis, age 12, of Knob Noster, Mo., for her question:
How do spiders spin their webs?
A beautiful round web of gray gossamer silk is created by the common orb spider. A hard working person could not equal her work in the time she takes to do it. HE would have to get up early and build a garage before breakfast. The orb spider builds a new web almost every day.
Spiders belong in the class Arachnida, and some 50,000 species have been identified. Arachnids are not all spinners of silken webs, and Each species has its own methods for building its gossamer web. Some are trapeze artists who spin silken tightropes to swing themselves from bough to bough. Many spinners weave cozy cocoons for their Eggs. Some weave funnel shaped webs, and some weave untidy nets of tangled threads.
The champion web weaver is the common orb spider, and it is a great treat to watch the leggy, little lady build her beautiful booby trap. You must get up Early for the show because as a rule her work begins at dam. The job takes an hour or so to complete, and if the little arachnid were human sized, the work would Equal the construction of a sturdy log cabin.
The raw silk material is a liquid manufactured by a gland in the spider's abdomen. The tacky supply of liquid silk is piped to the spinning organ which is where her tail would be, if she had a tail. The organ is a group of four, six or eight spinncrets like tiny faucets. The raw silk cannot be squirted out through the spinnercts. The spider presses her tummy against a solid surface to squeeze out the first drop. Then she presses to stick it to a leaf or twig, a rafter or a doorpost.
The liquid thread hardens at once in the air into a thread of silk. The spider walks away from the attached End using a leg to draw a longer and longer thread through her spinnerets. She paces out the pattern of her web step by step, and the silken line follows behind her. First, she uses extra strong threads for the supporting lines across the Web. Then she walks on this gridwork, around and around in a spiral, weaving the gauzy center of her round net. She Stops every few paces to test the strength of her work, and the little smartie smears the fine spiral threads with tacky gum. She can walk safely on the unssmeared cross lines while her struggling victims tangle hopelessly among the sticky threads.
Each little spider has her own tricks for drawing out the raw silk from her abdomen. She may use her silk only to travel. She fixes one End and parachutes down at the other End of the line. Sometimes the breeze is strong Enough to draw out her line and she lets the blowing threads stick and fix themselves like tightropes from twig to twig.