Michael Mlunmert, Age 10, Of Boise, Ida., For His Question:
What causes cobwebs?
Our language was not invented all at once. It grew and it changed through many generations. Many words were borrowed from other languages. Many old words were replaced by different words with the same meanings. Cobweb is a very old word that we kept even when we found newer words to replace it.
The language we speak in America was born long, long ago in England. But old English and middle English were so different frcm our modern English that we might mistake them for different languages. Cobweb was one of the everyday words used in middle English, and it has been handed down from parents to their children through hundreds of years.
In middle English, the name for a spider was coppe. The word web meant a piece of cloth. The people who spoke middle English also had another word for the leggy spider. It was spithre, and they had borrowed it from the still older word spinnan. A cobweb is the very same thing as a spider web. It is woven by a little spinning spider from her silken threads of silk.
There are thousands of different spiders in the world, and many of them spin filmy webs of gray. Each spider spins her own type of web, and an expert can tell you the name of a spider just by looking at her web. The material she uses is a tacky liquid made by special glands inside the tail end of her body.
She has openings called spinnerets at the end of her abdomen. They are connected by tiny tub es to the supply of web making material, and when the time comes to spin the web the spider opens the spinnerets like little faucets. The liquid comes out in thin streams. When they reach the air, they dry at once and become threads of the finest, softest silk.
The spider can spin a strong, thick thread or a fine, thin thread as she chooses. When she spins her web she uses her strongest threads to make the cross bars that run from side to side. She then uses a finer thread to weave around and around on the cross supports.
The finished cobweb, of course, is a trap. Mrs. Spider feeds on insects, but she is not spry enough to go out and hunt these flighty fellows. So she spins a cobweb and waits for a careless fly to zoom right into her net. There it becomes tangled and stuck, and the spider can come out and eat her dinner when she chooses.
There is a goofy gum on the cobweb to stop a fly from escaping. The harder it struggles to free itself, the more it becomes tangled and stuck. But Mrs. Spider never gets stuck in her own web. She places the gum only on certain threads. As she scurries out on her eight legs, she is very very careful to step only on the threads that have no sticky goo.